Schubert: Hanna Shybayeva

Album review

Although it bears the logo of the discount-oriented Brilliant label from the Netherlands, this disc is a production of an organization called the Young Pianist Foundation that works to further the careers of young Dutch pianists. With high-powered financial help from the giant ING banking firm in their corner, the artists involved get wide distribution of a kind generally unavailable to their peers in other countries. The Belarus-born pianist Hanna Shybayeva lives up to the efforts made on her behalf with this Schubert sonata program; her interpretation of the much-recorded Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959, is anything but by the book and reveals a fine developing talent. Shybayeva immediately announces her intentions in the sonata's Beethovenian opening material, which she treats with an unusual freedom of tempo. That introduces an almost fantasy-like reading of both that work and the Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 784. One advantage of Shybayeva's approach, beyond its generally involving quality, is that the highly dissonant climax of the slow movement of D. 959 doesn't seem quite as radical as it does in the general run of recordings; rather it emerges from a flow of events that has already been surprising, fantastic, and highly pianistic up to that point. Clocking in at more than three minutes longer than Alfred Brendel's version for Philips and seven minutes longer than Artur Schnabel, Shybayeva forges an original, discursive vision of the big A major sonata. There are, it's true, points where the long line is lost and the relation of part to whole becomes strained, but this release clearly identifies Shybayeva as a young artist to watch.

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