United States Various: Dame Mitsuko Uchida (piano). Carnegie Hall, New York, 9.4.2025. (ES-S)
Beethoven – Piano Sonata No.27 in E minor, Op.90
Schoenberg – Three Piano Pieces, Op.11
Kurtág – ‘Márta ligaturája’
Schubert – Piano Sonata No.21 in B-flat major, Op.posth.D.960
For her latest Carnegie Hall recital, Dame Mitsuko Uchida proposed a program that mirrored the architecture of a four-movement sonata: a sequence of contrasting parts, not merely juxtaposed but linked by subtle lines of kinship across time and style. Discarding chronology – and embracing the striking variations in scale – she guided her audience through a sequence of stylistic and emotional transformations: from the concise, elliptical expression of the Beethoven sonata to the expressive ruptures of Schoenberg, the crystalline restraint of Kurtág and, finally, the twilight landscape of Schubert’s Piano Sonata No.21.
Uchida began with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.27 in E minor, a liminal piece hovering between the clarity of his middle period and the inwardness of his late style. Its two-movement form, a rarity in Beethoven’s mature output, sets it apart from the broader architectural ambitions of his preceding sonatas. Yet as she made clear, within that compact frame lies an expressive world – full of exposed tensions and contradictions – by no means less vast. In the opening movement, Uchida laid bare the music’s uneasy grammar of abrupt contrasts and asymmetries but tamed its restlessness with calm and grace. She let its motivic material speak plainly – haunting gestures that seemed to echo each other like fragments of speech. The second movement’s luminous cantabile, melodious yet inward, glanced toward Schubert. Uchida revealed structural depth here too, shaping the opening phrase as a quiet response to what had come before – an act of transformation, as if tension had been revoiced as memory. Not so much an aria as a conversation recalled, its lyricism was tinged with something retrospective, unfinished.
By placing a work of the Second Viennese School directly after Beethoven, Uchida emphasized both continuity and chasm – drawing a line from motivic density to expressive fracture. Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, composed in 1909 at a moment of artistic and cultural upheaval, may have marked a break with tonality, but under Uchida’s hands it also revealed its roots in Beethoven’s concentrated, unsettled language. The first piece emerged from that world of motivic compression, though its gestures – stripped of their tonal context yet still recognizable – seemed adrift, like returning remnants of a language no longer fully spoken. Uchida emphasized line and voice-leading, revealing how Schoenberg’s new grammar still drew upon Brahmsian architecture even as it pointed toward Webern’s sparse intensity. It was hard not to think of Cubist painting here – not merely as metaphor but as method: a world dismantled and reassembled on new expressive terms, where surface and structure could no longer be disentangled.
In the second piece, she let oscillating pulses drift in and out of focus, framing a phantasmagoric middle section where texture overtook form, like a dream suddenly aware of its own dissolving logic. As in Erwartung, Schoenberg’s monodrama composed that same year, each fragment flickered into view and vanished before its implications could take hold. The third, by contrast, erupted in iridescent shards – a volatile finale, less a resolution than a disintegration.
Kurtág’s ‘Márta ligaturája’ arrived after the interval like a distilled echo of Schoenberg’s score – more intimate and stripped of density. Written in memory of the composer’s wife, the piece hovered at the edge of audibility. Uchida seemed to perform the miniature from manuscript pages, as if handling something fragile and unfinished. The resonances, originally conceived for cimbalom, became ghostly and sacred. Two voices circled one another in slow, elegiac suspension – a ligature in both the musical and emotional sense. If Beethoven’s motifs were fragmented in Schoenberg, here they were refined into whispers, touches and stillness.
Schubert followed attacca, as if Kurtág’s hushed fragments had simply coalesced into something more sustained. The Sonata No.21 in B-flat major did not so much begin as emerge. Uchida resisted the temptation to amplify its architecture and soundscape for the Stern Auditorium. Instead, she embraced its intimacy, allowing the first movement to breathe in slow, unhurried arcs. The opening theme rose out of stillness, and when the low trill in the bass arrived, it didn’t startle – it murmured, like a buried memory surfacing without warning.
The Andante sostenuto moved at a slow tempo, yet nothing felt static. Uchida shaped each phrase with quiet intensity, pacing the movement so that it seemed to unfold in the rhythm of breath. Her voicing was especially refined: the right-hand melody floated delicately above the rocking figures in the left, the balance between the two never rigid. At times the accompaniment seemed to surface, as if the memory it carried was briefly more insistent than the theme itself. When the music turned briefly to major, Uchida brought an ‘un-jubilatory’ warmth, keeping the sense of suspended time intact. The return to the opening material felt changed by the quiet weight of what had passed.
The Scherzo arrived like a whiff of air. Uchida kept its textures transparent and its character playful without tipping into irony. The Trio, with its syncopated rhythm, felt momentarily unanchored, as if the music had stepped briefly into another register of thought. In the finale, Uchida maintained a supple pacing that allowed the music’s wandering character to emerge naturally. The movement drifted between major and minor, the modulations elusively suggestive rather than directional. A few moments of instability flickered by, but they scarcely mattered; the sense of continuity was never broken in the sequence of episodes that felt both distinct and impermanent. The Presto coda arrived not as culmination, but as release – a final breath exhaled after long-held stillness.
With her characteristic combination of lucidity and inwardness, Uchida curated and interpreted a program where connections between works emerged via both logic and intuition.
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Image: Dame Mitsuko Uchida © Fadi Kheir