All the wit of Beethoven

Andras Schiff is a compact man with a large head. He walked onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage Wednesday night like a cross between an absent-minded professor and Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp. When he sat at the piano to play Beethoven's Sonata, Opus 31, No. 1, his hands danced on the keyboard with extraordinary grace. He grinned and grimaced. He delighted in the delicacy of his fingers bouncing off the keys. If Chaplin had been a great pianist, this might have been his Beethoven.

Wednesday's recital was not all whimsy. Schiff has returned to Disney this season to play the second half of his Beethoven cycle, which will continue with another program next week and conclude with two more in the spring. Opus 31, No. 1 is the halfway point, the 16th of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas. Schiff, who has just completed a revelatory recording of the cycle on ECM, treats the series as an epic narrative in 32 chapters.

For this recital, Schiff did something extraordinary. He played the three sonatas from Opus 31 together in the first half, which created its own 75-minute drama. The sonatas have different characters. The comedy at the start was merely a way to approach serious matters.

Beethoven wrote these sonatas in 1802. A new century had begun, and hopes were high for a revolutionary new world order. The composer's relationship with world order, though, was troubled. He sought new realms for music and had, by mid-career, both the youthful vitality and technical competence to achieve what had never before been achieved in music. He was also going deaf. He was simultaneously getting more deeply inside his own head and transcending his ego. These sonatas are the diaries of a crucial moment in music.

Schiff's Beethoven is intimate. The Hungarian pianist first came to wide attention as a Bach player of illuminating eloquence, which he carries over to his Beethoven. He gives the impression of slowing down time, so that a listener can get inside a phrase or measure while never losing the larger picture.

That is where the wit comes in with Opus 31, No. 1. Beethoven wrote a bass note landing a fraction of a second after a chord, and Schiff finds comedy in it, the pratfall. He treats the long, slow movement as a parody of Italian opera, a little exaggerated and a lot of fun. The Rondo is lyricism lost, a dream interrupted by a goofy final cadence. Beethoven dances fabulously in his imagination and gets all the girls, but then awakes a klutz.