This month, two young pianists are mak­ing splashy debuts. One of them is no stranger to clas­si­cal music fans, that’s Jeremy Denk, who already has a few self-produced CDs, includ­ing a great record­ing of the Ives Con­cord Sonata to his name, as well as a well-known blog and pub­lished arti­cles in the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review. But he is now on None­such, his major label debut. The other is HJ Lim who has, through the mys­ter­ies of the clas­si­cal music busi­ness, been able to debut on another major label, EMI, in the most mag­nif­i­cent way pos­si­ble, with a com­plete set of the Beethoven piano sonatas.

Even more auda­cious, the first sonata on the first disc is the Op. 106 “Ham­merklavier,” which is a dif­fi­cult work for even the most accom­plished pianists. This is a clear state­ment of artis­tic inten­tion and ambi­tion. She han­dles it with enough ease to make some par­tic­u­lar expres­sive choices, some which seem mis­guided and all point­ing towards her fun­da­men­tal view of the com­poser, which is as a proto-Lisztian Roman­tic. It’s an inter­est­ing and valid idea, but I don’t feel she makes a con­vinc­ing case through­out the thirty-two sonatas. Beethoven strad­dled worlds, clos­ing out the Clas­si­cal era and single-handedly cre­at­ing the Roman­tic one. That means there are inte­gral ele­ments of both con­cepts in the pieces, with Roman­tic per­sonal expres­sion sup­ported by mas­ter­ful Clas­si­cal struc­tures. That includes the Op. 106.

She tends toward over­do­ing changes in tempo. She’s not the first pianist to mod­u­late tempo for expres­sive pur­poses with­out Beethoven call­ing for it, but where oth­ers, like Kempff and Nat do it judi­ciously, she does it per­va­sively. Her ritard on the last page of the first move­ment is already too much, and in the con­text it dimin­ishes the impro­vi­sa­tional feel­ing of her expres­sive play­ing in the “Ada­gio sostenuto,” which is some­thing spe­cial. In her pro­gram notes, she focusses on Beethoven and the myth of Prometheus, see­ing fire as a metaphor for knowl­edge and spir­i­tu­al­ity, and the com­poser as spread­ing what she con­sid­ers a divine inspi­ra­tion through­out his cul­ture. This isn’t wrong, but it’s also not quite right, and too sim­plis­tic. Prometheus is a metaphor for the Enlight­ment, of which Beethoven was a child, and in that con­text knowl­edge is an anti­dote for received wis­dom, includ­ing the spir­i­tual kind in the hier­ar­chal struc­ture of Chris­tian­ity. It also misses the point that what Prometheus gave mankind was a tool, and tools are used to build and make. Beethoven is the great­est builder of all the com­posers, piec­ing together incre­men­tal units into archi­tec­tures that are mas­sive, inde­struc­tible and still fluid in shape and quick in feel.

This has some­thing to do with tempo, and rhythm, the lat­ter ele­ments being the thing that holds music together through time. Beethoven uses rhythm to build ten­sion like a coiled spring, and the best way to con­vey that musi­cally is by pre­ci­sion in tempo, which winds the spring sub­tly but pow­er­fully. Push the tempo around too much, and the ten­sion, and some of Beethoven him­self, is lost. Rubinstein’s play­ing of the sonatas is an exact and fan­tas­tic demon­stra­tion of what a steady tempo does for the music, and Lim loses a lot in not being dis­ci­plined about tempo, one of Beethoven’s pieces of fire.

I am being crit­i­cal because this is impor­tant music, and music that pianists use to prove them­selves to audi­ences. Lim is no slouch, and this set is, although uneven, cer­tainly not bad and often very impres­sive. Dip­ping into the pieces, I hear:

• The ‘Wald­stein’ is fine and her tran­si­tion to the “Rondo Alle­gretto” is sur­pris­ingly under­stated, the rolling phrases car­ry­ing sat­is­fy­ing emo­tional weight.
• The “Alle­gretto — Più mosso” move­ment of the Sonata in F Op. 54 is tech­ni­cally messy, although the tempo is not at some of the extremes she approches at other times. She has no short­age of chops, so per­haps this is a lack of preparation.
• The ‘Pas­torale’ sonata is well-balanced between relaxed lyri­cism and sturm und drang, one of the best things in the set.
• In the ‘Les Adieux’ sonata, the mys­tery of the open­ing chords is lost in her rush to hit the “Alle­gro” mark, though the sec­ond move­ment is excel­lent. In the final move­ment, “Vivacis­si­ma­mente” seems to have been writ­ten with her in mind.
• The first sonata, Op. 2 No. 1, is a great early work, and Lim rushes through it perfunctorily
• The ‘Appa­sion­ata’ is suit­ably dra­matic and not at all overdone.
• Her ‘Moon­light’ sonata is fast and sur­pris­ingly intense, a high­light of the set.

Except for the mixed ‘Ham­merklavier,’ her play­ing of the last hand­ful of sonatas is impres­sive and I would gladly lis­ten to those tracks rather than pull Goode, Kempff, Lewis, Schn­abel or Gulda off the shelves. Not that she replaces those record­ings, but she’s a good com­ple­ment and com­pan­ion to them. After this start, I’m more than a lit­tle curi­ous about what she will move on to next. I’d like to hear her play Liszt, which seems per­fect for her hands, her heart and her mind.

A word about the record­ings them­selves; I was sent the “Mas­tered for iTunes” dig­i­tal down­load, and I do not know what the point of the engi­neer­ing is. The music was cap­tured in Faller Hall, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzer­land, and the acoustic space around the piano has breadth and depth with­out too much reverb, but the final qual­ity is bright to the point of giv­ing the tex­ture a weird brit­tle­ness inside a good sonic field. It’s highly engi­neered with­out much atten­tion paid to how it sounds.

This set is cur­rently avail­able at the iTunes store for the pro­mo­tional price of $9.99, which makes it self-recommending. This would be a value at three times that price or more, and if you’d like to add a com­plete Beethoven sonata cycle to your library, don’t hes­i­tate, espe­cially if this will be your first. If you know this music already, there is a lot of plea­sure and sat­is­fac­tion in the set. If you’d like a sam­ple, you can down­load her record­ing of the Op. 109 Sonata in exchange for noth­ing more than your email address.

Jeremy Denk’s major label debut is a great CD. More com­pact than Lim’s, but cov­ers more ground musi­cally in pair­ing the first two books of Ligeti’s Etudes Pour Piano with Beethoven’s final sonata, in C minor Op. 111. Both are mas­ter­pieces of the piano lit­er­a­ture, the ear­lier music point­ing the way, tech­ni­cally and aes­thet­i­cally, to Ligeti’s own great achieve­ment, a set of pieces that pianists will be play­ing reg­u­larly 100 years from now.

The top layer fea­ture of the Etudes is their tech­ni­cal chal­lenges, espe­cially the first one of the first book, “Désor­dre,” which makes one musi­cian sound like three (and as I saw Ligeti demon­strate in a lecture-performance in the mid-1990’s, was crafted with genius level sim­plic­ity). The music also explores the deep resources the piano has for polyphony, poly-rhythms and har­monic tex­tures, and Ligeti cre­ates tremen­dous, and tremen­dously fas­ci­nat­ing and excit­ing, com­plex­ity out of a pro­lif­er­a­tion of lines and also a spare sense of har­mony that is both mys­te­ri­ous and highly advanced. From the per­spec­tive of sheer, cold craft, these are some of the most accom­plished com­po­si­tions in the his­tory of West­ern clas­si­cal music, on par with Stravinsky’s vir­tu­oso lan­guage in his Vio­lin Con­certo. Like that work, the Etudes take stock of the enor­mous pre­vi­ous his­tory and both syn­the­size it and point in new direc­tions. Ligeti’s point in his­tory means Bach, Beethoven, Lizst and also John Coltrane and African music via Steve Reich.

The mix of tra­di­tion and imag­i­na­tion means that beyond craft, this is some of the most phys­i­cally and intel­lec­tu­ally involv­ing and excit­ing music there is, full of punchy rhythms, a beguil­ing way with build­ing clouds of ambi­ent sound, and a very Roman­tic feel­ing of per­sonal expres­sion that gropes its way towards the incom­pre­hen­si­ble mys­ter­ies that lie both inside and beyond all of us. Denk tack­les all this with a feel­ing of strength and rigor that I admire. He han­dles the pianis­tic demands with a mea­sured sense of effort, you can hear how damn hard some of the music is to play with­out ever feel­ing that it’s beyond him, and even in the most extreme expres­sive ideas, like in “Ver­tige” and “En sus­pens” in Book II, he never lets the gauze cloud a clear view of the music.

Still, he brings out the Roman­tic qual­ity in the music, more so than in the other fine record­ings by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and Fredrik Ullén. He rein­forced this at his CD release recital on May 21st at Le Pois­son Rouge, where in between the clos­ing etudes of Book I, “Arc-en-ciel” and “Automne à Varso­vie,” he elided Lizst’s tran­scrip­tion of “Weinen, Kla­gen, Sor­gen Zagen” from the Bach can­tata. It was a plan­gent explo­ration of how hun­dreds of years of the devel­op­ment of knowl­edge about abstract struc­tures, rules of har­mony and coun­ter­point, could be used as the foun­da­tion for search­ing and icon­o­clas­tic expres­sion. And that’s what makes the Beethove sonata such an amaz­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion with Ligeti.

Op. 111 is music that only a deaf com­poser could write. Denk spoke about pair­ing the “mania of Beethoven with the mania of Ligeti,” each shar­ing a fer­vent and not alto­gether sane needed to free them­selves of the ideas that made their art pos­si­ble. Where Ligeti assumes the listener’s famil­iar­ity with musi­cal his­tory, Beethoven uses the first move­ment of the sonata to review it, like a med­ley, a nut­shell of key­board music in eight and a half min­utes. The sec­ond move­ment is entirely dif­fer­ent, focussed on both the sim­plest musi­cal ideas and the most com­plex emo­tional expres­sion. The music breaks down to a series of repeated phrases and seem­ingly end­less trills, mono­ma­ni­a­cal in a way that never returned in music until the advent of the Min­i­mal­ists. It’s as if, hear­ing only music in his head, Beethoven could con­cen­trate on the small­est bits, the kind of mate­r­ial that in any other composer’s hand would be no more than dec­o­ra­tion. He, though, had only an inter­nal sense of time, or time­less­ness, and so that frag­ment could expand in the moment to become the thing itself. Imag­ine the sweet, bright sound of a trill in your head, indulge in the phys­i­cal sen­sa­tion in the mind’s ear, the two notes almost lit­er­ally caress­ing the imag­i­na­tion. Now imag­ine that you can­not hear any­thing around you, except what’s in the mind’s ear, there is noth­ing to tear you away from that plea­sure. What type of ecstasy is pos­si­ble? In Beethoven’s case, the most exalted kind. What might be an aural prison becomes instead utter free­dom, the free­dom to say, this is beau­ti­ful and exalted to me, and I only need this, and I offer it to you.

While Lim plays this well, Denk plays it with the poise and dig­nity that Beethoven con­stantly demands, and that demands matu­rity. Beethoven was a great human­ist, demand­ing by exam­ple that all peo­ple be afforded respect, and Denk chan­nels that force. The take cap­tured on the CD is great, one of the best, built on a sense of how each phrase leads inevitably to the next. His per­for­mance at Le Pois­son Rouge was extra­or­di­nary, it absolutely silenced the staff and the crowd. There was the rap­tur­ous feel­ing of being in the hands of a great artist, of see­ing through him to each mea­sure and page of the score, watch­ing the notes laid out and build­ing, each upon each, know­ing at every moment what would come next, and rel­ish­ing each moment for how beau­ti­ful and sat­is­fy­ing that would be.