Those assembled at Boston’s Jordan Hall were thoroughly prepared to be enraptured, there to hear a renowned and highly respected pianist pay homage to the last piano sonatas of four German classical composers — Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert.

Sir András Schiff performing Friday at NEC’s Jordan Hall in a recital presented by the Celebrity Series of Boston. Photo: Robert Torres.

By Susan Miron

Few audience members who were present will forget when, in a Celebrity Series concert in November 2013, pianist Sir András Schiff bestowed upon his adoring audience an encore — the magisterial second movement of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Op. 111. When someone coughed, things got ugly. Suddenly, the pianist stopped; he explained he was giving the audience a gift, implying that the cough was no way to respond to an act of generosity.

Friday night, in a sold-out recital, also presented by Celebrity Series, I did not hear a single cough. Or noise, except for a sneeze which, in this reverential silence, packed the shock value of a dozen phones ringing. Those assembled at Boston’s Jordan Hall were thoroughly prepared to be enraptured, there to hear a renowned and highly respected pianist pay homage to the last piano sonatas of four German classical composers — Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert.

In a program note, Schiff highlighted the difference between “late” works by composers who died young and those from ones such as Haydn, who lived a long life. He also said there was a valuable distinction to be made between pieces (like Mozart’s and Haydn’s) written several years before the composer’s death and the quasi-valedictory nature of Schubert’s final sonatas.

Schiff’s recital, with which he is touring extensively, opened with Haydn’s delightful Sonata No. 62 in E-flat Major, Hob. XVI:52. Unlike the piano sonatas of Mozart, which I knew well (by ear) from a relatively early age, the 62 sonatas of Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) have, at least until recently, not been as frequently chosen as recital pieces. The E-flat sonata was a terrific concert opener — charming, witty, and inventive. By the middle of the sonata I was sorry Sir András (knighted by the Queen in 2014) wasn’t playing an all-Haydn recital. What was immediately noticeable was the distinctive Schiff sound emanating from his stupendous Bösendorfer 280VC grand piano, which was the most beautiful piano I have heard in my lifetime of listening to recitals and recordings. What a glorious sound! The high register had an angelic tinkling, a sparkle that often recalled the sound of high woodwinds. The bass was glorious, and the middle register lustrous and voluptuous with an exquisite tonal beauty which served all of these last sonatas well.

The 62 year old Schiff became known to most listeners decades ago with his astonishingly fine performances and recordings of Bach, all of whose solo works he has memorized, and whose music he considers “a manifestation of divinity.” He claims to still practice Bach an hour every day.  I would argue that his comfort and facility with multiple voices and counterpoint lends his performances of other German music their crystalline clarity (he no long plays Bach on the piano with any pedal).

Schiff sees Beethoven’s (1720-1827) Sonata in C minor, Op. 111 (1822), with its two-movement structure and mystical air, as the composer’s farewell to the genre of keyboard sonatas. It doesn’t matter that the composer’s death was still five years off and he would still write the magnificent “Diabelli Variations,” which Schiff played brilliantly on his last visit here. The pianist detests how the dotted, “jazzy” variations of the second movement have been described by some critics as “boogie-woogie.” He is offended by the casual description; he loves this piece and finds such labels belittling. (A stern but illuminating lecturer, Schiff delivers a compelling talk about this sonata on YouTube). The pianist brings an unmistakably ethereal approach to Beethoven, especially in the high trills towards the end. This performance was not only infinitely colored, but architecturally so thoroughly thought out that all of the piece’s complex miraculousness seemed, oddly, inevitable. The experience was, in a word, transcendental. But this was far more than a “technical” feat. As Schiff pointed out in an interview:

“Today, the concept of technique is continually misunderstood. People speak so much today of technique: “Such and such pianist has great technique.” Mostly, this is misunderstood — the pianist celebrated now by music critics as a ‘fantastic technician,’ is mostly the one who plays the fastest and the loudest, and doesn’t produce any wrong notes. But, on the contrary, great technique signifies, to me, an infinitely alive ‘sound-imagination’ and ‘-inventiveness’ — and then, to realize this. In this way, the realization of the richness of color is achieved. If a pianist hears only two colors, the realization of those is no great art. To me, in this sense, Alfred Cortot, who played many wrong notes, had the greatest technique. Because he produced an unbelievable richness of color on the piano, millions of colors — like a great painter. That’s very important to me. That’s why painting and the other arts, to me, are so important. Recently, I was at a Frans Hals exhibit, and in the descriptions it was stated that he could depict over thirty shades of black alone. You can see it in his paintings: there is hiding a tremendous technique, of course, but moreover, a corresponding conception. First comes the idea, then the technique. And not reversed.”

Schiff treated his rapt post-intermission audience to Mozart’s Sonata No. 18 in D Major, K. 576, which he played with great tenderness and sweetness. Mozart (1756-1791) was 33 when he wrote his Sonata No. 18 — it was two years before his death. It’s a piece one doesn’t hear nearly as often as the more ‘popular’ Mozart sonatas. Schiff had here what early piano teachers are fond of calling “a beautiful touch” which translates, I think, into a beautiful sound. How much of this divine sound can credited to Schiff and how much to his mighty Bösendorfer is anyone’s guess, but it was a privilege to hear such heavenly sounds on an evening that began with a hellish dearth of parking spaces and ended with my discovery that my car had been towed. It was all worth it, if just for this earful of Mozart.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was in the last stages of syphilis when he finished his marvelous Sonata No. 21 in B-flat. Musicians have long speculated whether in some ways this forty-minute piece mirrors the dark final thoughts of a very young man about to die. Schiff believes “the first two movements are about death. The third is a kind of hallucination of life after death.”

Schiff’s insightful, deliberate performance reflected his view of the piece. “There is little indication of a Schubert ready for death,” Schiff has argued. The Schubert and Beethoven are two of my very favorite works for piano, and it was wonderful to hear their last  sonatas along with those of Haydn and Mozart  in one concert. For Schiff, the final  three Beethoven sonatas are a good program, while the three last Schubert sonatas, which proffer “spellbinding visions,” are “enormous constructions,” twice as long as those of Beethoven. The pianist feels that the emotional impact they create is “overwhelming, almost unbearable.”

The audience adored Schiff, bursting into rapturous applause, standing and calling him back on stage many times. He rewarded the enthusiasm with a performance of the Andantino from Schubert’s Sonata in A Major, D. 959. In this piece he was — curiously — the freest he had been all evening long (two and half-hours). The rendition was glorious; I would have happily sat through the whole sonata. The pianist was playing amazingly well, perhaps the best he had played all evening. Schiff obviously loves doing encores, so he moved onto Mozart’s delightful, calming Adagio for Glass Harmonica. It was a lithe capstone to a memorable concert that was lifted into the stratosphere by the sound of a remarkable piano played with dazzling elegance and formidable intelligence.

Susan Miron, a harpist, has been a book reviewer for over 20 years for a large variety of literary publications and newspapers. Her fields of expertise were East and Central European, Irish, and Israeli literature. Susan covers classical music for The Arts Fuse and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. She is part of the Celtic harp and storytelling duo A Bard’s Feast with renowned storyteller Norah Dooley and, until recently, played the Celtic harp at the Cancer Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital.