Honestly I felt some sort of relief, when I watched Barenboim's recording on youtube.
As you might have noticed, I even managed to get that bagdad battery lampshade (which you didn't like) out of sight!
hello wolfi,personally I find your version refreshing and enjoyable to listen to .... it is for me a much gentler and more musical "Pathétique". A good number of pianists seems to play this with with aggressiveness and more "banging" of the keys as if it must reflect the "anger and tempestuousness" of Beethoven. ...... I like it as it is!!! (though I am not a pianist)
I was delighted to hear this. I was brought up on the Rudolf Serkin interpretation of this piece. He repeats the GRAVE. I think the case for repeating the GRAVE can be made as follows. First, Beethoven did not explicitly put in a repeat sign. Second: in the recapitulation, Beethoven does return to the GRAVE tempo, and the contrast of it with the fast and violent sound before and after is very delectable, just as the GRAVE is when repeated after a loud and fast expo. Of course, repeating the GRAVE makes it considerably much easier to endure the tremolos, and the Puritan in us has trouble not feeling guilty, not feeling that doing things the easier way must be wrong, nay immoral! (I do penance by playing the right-hand mordents as such rather than as triplets.) As I'm sure is familiar to you, the GRAVE is one of the few passages of music in which one-hundred-twenty-eighth notes appear. I've always grooved on that. When I was in fifth grade, I thumbed through every piece of sheet music my mother owned, to see if I could find examples of one-hundred-twenty-eighth notes or even two-hundred-fifty-sixth notes. You'd have thought that I was Mozart himself, so much interested in music did I seem to be! Of course, the meditation on this subject got me thinking about powers of two, and so, mathematics, and so, getting to be a college valedictorian with honors in mathematics, and so, actuarial science. I wound up servicing pension plans for twenty years. Anyhow, here is a very mischievous fingering for some of those beloved one-hundred-twenty-eighth notes in the GRAVE, measure ten. Starting with the right thumb on the G below high C, where the left hand is doing the minor tonic 6-4 chord, use the thumb, then the fifth finger on the Eb above high C, then go down the chromatic scale (whee!) 5432143215432154321543215432151 ! This lets you be utterly relaxed to attack the allegro with all the violence you want, not that the critics will necessarily like that! Take care!