Beethoven: Sonata No.1 in F Minor, Op.2 No.1 (Kovacevich, Lewis, Buchbinder)

So if someday extraterrestrials visit Earth, and (inexplicably) ask about Sonata Form – what it is and how it works – there’d be a very short list of candidate sonatas you could probably put together to use as model examples of “perfect” sonatas, and this one, B.’s very first, would have to be high up the list. It’s not a radically innovative sonata, and displays few of the boundary-busting tendencies that are already apparent in the very next sonata he writes, but it is by any standard an incredibly powerful work that does not come into shame even if set down beside B.’s last 5 sonatas (after all, what makes a sonata “new” is only a function of when it was written, not how well it works, musically, on its own terms). You’ve got that taut, beautifully precise Mvt 1, where Themes 1 & 2 are woven out of the same motivic cloth, the development already has a muscularity (and crunchy syncopation) that tugs a little at the boundaries of the classical idiom, and not a single note is wasted on superfluous