Schubert : Impromptus

Album review

Hungarian pianist Klára Würtz has concertized widely and achieved a reputation as something of a connoisseur's player. She hasn't always been treated well by the small labels for which she has recorded; this 2011 release on Piano Classics includes a booklet biography announcing her plans for the 2006 season. This is a shame, for her recordings are never less than stimulating, and she has an admirable ability to think out interpretations that run counter to type. Her readings of Schubert's familiar eight Impromptus, which are anything but impromptu, have an attractively restless quality without being overdramatic. Wherever there is passagework that generally has been taken as ethereal and meditative, Würtz pushes it forward. Sample the opening of the familiar Impromptu in A flat major, Op. 90/4, for the effect. The overall impression of Würtz's performance is the presence of a large range of emotions in the Impromptus, which have a fine inward quality here. The sizable Impromptu in F minor, Op. 142/1, holds up well in its long passages of slow modulations, leading ineluctably to an intense climax. Würtz is not a pianist who reaches out and grabs you, and there are more felicitious versions of the variation-form Impromptu in B flat major, Op. 142/3, out there, and more instantly recognizable readings of the whole set of eight. But this is an album that will richly repay close listening.

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