Sonatas for Pianoforte and Violin Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), ed. Clive Brown Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2020 Two volumes (each with score/urtext violin part/performance part), pp. lxxv + 151/49/49, lxxvii + 210/64/64, ISMN 979 0 006 56378 4

Clive Brown’s edition of the complete Beethoven sonatas for violin and piano is one of many Bärenreiter Urtext editions of Beethoven’s music published in time for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2020. It is only the second modern critical edition of this repertory, and it comes more than forty years after Sieghard Brandenburg’s version for the so-called Neue Gesamtausgabe (Beethoven Werke, series 5, volumes 1 and 2 (Munich: Henle, 1974)), which did not include a critical report. Brown’s edition goes far beyond updating our current understanding of the text and source materials for the sonatas, however. As well as a critical commentary and historical introduction to the sonatas, it provides a wealth of information about historical performance. The edition has two violin parts: an urtext with minimal editorial intervention, and a performance part edited with historically inspired fingerings and bowings that often reflect practices that are ‘no longer familiar in this repertoire’ (xxxvi). The preface material includes an extended essay on historical performance practices associated with Beethoven’s music, and the edition comes with an accompanying online performance-practice commentary, co-written with fortepianist Neal Peres da Costa, that includes bar-by-bar explanations of many of the editorial notations in the performance part as well as suggestions for further historically informed approaches. The edition aims not only to present a critically edited text for the sonatas, but also to enable performers to experiment with performance practices that ‘can help us reinvigorate [Beethoven’s] music with some of the unfamiliarity and unpredictability that made it so challenging and exciting for his contemporaries’ (x). The source materials for Beethoven’s violin sonatas are not plentiful: in the case of the first four of the ten sonatas, the source nearest to the composer is the first edition, while some autograph and copyists’ manuscripts survive from Op. 24 onwards. Unsurprisingly, the text of Brown’s edition does not differ substantially from that of the Neue Gesamtausgabe, though the Critical Report details many instances where the sources contain ambiguities or textual errors. One of the most consistent ambiguities is the placement of slurs, over which neither Beethoven nor the engravers of the first editions apparently took particular care. Brown, like the previous editors of the violin sonatas, has therefore had to do a fair amount of interpretation in his notation of the performing parts, but his critical notes and occasional footnotes in the parts themselves often indicate plausible alternative readings. The essay ‘Reading between the Lines of Beethoven’s Notation’, which is presented in both English and German across more than sixty pages at the beginning of each volume of the piano part, presents an overview of evidence relating to the performing practices of Beethoven’s lifetime. While information about historical approaches to ornamentation, articulation and tempo is commonplace in modern urtext editions of classical repertory, Brown’s essay also outlines a wealth of