Schubert & Czerny: Capriccio appassionato (Keyboard Sonatas)

Album review

Pianist, harpsichordist and pianofortist Aurelia Vişovan delivers her exciting project bringing together a great Schubert sonata, ‘D. 958’, and a Carl Czerny masterpiece, ‘Grand Sonata No. 6 in D minor’, which totals fifty minutes of intense and sophisticated music. Behind the pedagogue who was loved by his pupils, such as Thalberg or Liszt, there indeed lies a composer of great talent.

Like Beethoven, whom he admired, Czerny tried to go beyond the possibilities of the piano in this immensely complex work, which consists of seven movements with an extensive chorale with variations.

The choice of an old fortepiano, a copy by Robert Brown of a Viennese piano, did not make it easy for Vişovan to play such wild music, but it enabled her to bring out the polyphony in a very readable way and to produce a great variety of colourings and sounds.

Listening to this ‘Grand Sonata’ by Czerny completely changes the perception one might have had of this composer who so tortured young pianists with his Études. Beyond the technical demands of this great piano work, we find inventive, strong, dramatic and daring music whose connections to Beethoven and Schubert are obvious. Aurelia Vişovan finds many of these connections between the works of Schubert and Czerny; thematic connections, but also the fact that they were both Viennese, contemporaries, and united by their common devotion to Beethoven. This is an absolutely sumptuous recording which is not to be missed. © François Hudry/Qobuz