Gabriel Schwabe: Beethoven

The Strad Issue: January 2025

Description: A Beethoven cycle concludes with aplomb

Musicians: Gabriel Schwabe (cello) Nicholas Rimmer (piano)

Works: Beethoven: Complete Works for Cello and Piano Volume 2: Sonatas nos.3–5; Variations on ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’

Catalogue number: NAXOS 8574530

These works fit conveniently into the three-period timeline traditionally associated with Beethoven’s composing career. Gabriel Schwabe and Nicholas Rimmer are both natural Beethovenians. Rimmer’s virtuosity predominates initially in the Variations on ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’, but Schwabe later gains more prominence in the dialogue, notably in the imitative counterpoint in Vars. 6 and 9, the canon in Var. 10 and the ornately embellished eleventh variation.

Roles are more evenly distributed in the sonatas from op.69 onwards, with the players combining to give powerful readings, deftly negotiating Beethoven’s abrupt shifts in dynamic, mood and texture. Schwabe reproduces Beethoven’s long melodic lines with vocal eloquence, shining especially in his cello’s upper register in the two outer movements of the Third Sonata. Rimmer displays technical dexterity and crisp articulation a-plenty, especially in the finale’s Allegro vivace, and a strikingly expressive touch in the Adagio cantabile and the notorious note reiterations in the scherzo’s trio.

The two op.102 sonatas are the heavyweights of the album. Both players feel the music of no.1 to its bones, performing it with due freedom and expression and relishing the intensely contrapuntal development of its finale. Their reading of no.2 comprises a similar mix of drama, lyricism, solemn dialogue and complex counterpoint, convincingly conveyed. The recording is clear, warmly spacious and ideally balanced.

ROBIN STOWELL