Schubert : Sonates Nos. 4 and 18 / Lachenmann : 5 Variations sur un thème de Schubert, Guero

Album review

Romanian-German pianist Herbert Schuch here offers a Schubert sonata recording that avoids the three final masterpieces yet succeeds in conveying the heft toward which Schubert was striving in several of his earlier works. The massive Piano Sonata in G major, D. 894, composed in 1826, equals the final B flat sonata in scope. Annotator Michael Kube points out that the work was published not as a sonata but under the title "Fantasie, Andante, Menuetto und Allegretto," showing the conceptual difficulty the work (and others of Schubert) caused the few listeners who heard them in his own time. Its long first movement is indeed something of a fantasy, less closely knit together than the B flat work but not improvisatory either. Kube puts it nicely: the movement "seems to exist in a world of its own and to be constructed of tonal surfaces." Schuch pays explicit tribute to Alfred Brendel in his own notes, and his playing here has a good deal of Brendel's careful, intellectual quality -- not exactly the thing, perhaps, for the effusion of melody in this sonata and in the simpler Piano Sonata in A minor, D 537, but quite effective in its balance among the large-scale sections of the G major sonata's first movement and quietly lyrical in the long stretches of figuration at the top of the keyboard. These are beautifully recorded by Oehms, with the pianist almost seeming to caress the keys. In all, it's a low-key Schubert recording that can stand comparison with any of the classics from Rudolf Serkin on down. The bookending works by contemporary composer Helmut Lachenmann, however, will be a disincentive for many listeners. They are linked to the Schubert only by the opening Five Variations on a Theme of Franz Schubert, based on a short binary dance. Lachenmann dutifully followed the dominant instructions of the day, in the serialist procedures of this 1950s work and the ethnic sounds of Guero (1970), which turns the piano into a giant Latin percussion instrument. The latter work, especially, shatters the mood.

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