Alexander Krichel Leise Schubert#

In his Piano Quartet and Quintet, Schumann revisited the frameworks inherited from Schubert and Beethoven to create astonishingly innovative structures. Their grandiose musical and emotional gestures place these works among his supreme achievements. The prestigious artists assembled here, with their extensive experience of performing Schumann’s chamber music and concertos, do full justice to his imaginative world.

One might be forgiven for initially thinking that this recital featuring works for cello and piano by Franz Schubert, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg was, well, a stunt. After all, aside from their birth in the city of Vienna, what do the three composers have in common? Schubert was the quintessential master of lyrical Austro-German romanticism, while Webern and Berg were two of the three most reviled masters of atonal Austro-German expressionism – the third, of course, was Arnold Schoenberg – and one might think they'd be an impossible coupling.

Richter was always a fan of Schubert's Piano music. He recorded over half of the Sonatas, the Wanderer Fantasie, some of the Impromptus and the Trout Piano Quintet to name a few works. Early in his career he would tear through impromptus, and play the Wander Fantasie with force and power. Fast forward much later at this point when these Sonatas were performed, and Richter was still playing some of the most difficult works in piano repertoire, such as Prokofiev Sonatas, Chopin Etudes and Liszt. In the case of these of composers its hard not to be inclined to be enjoy his earlier recordings more, but that is not the case here with Schubert.

This is a reissue CD set of the 15 Schubert Quartets by the Weiner (Vienna) Konzerthaus Quartet. This 6 CD set was issued by Universal Music France in 1998. The 20-bit remastering from the original master tapes is excellent. Although these hard to find monaural Westminster label recordings date from 1950 to 1953, the sound is full and warm. The playing and performances are superb. The CD booklet notes in French and English leave something to desire. However, this CD set is worth getting your hands on while it's still available!

Everything that Nikolaus Harnoncourt does is interesting, and sometimes inspired. Even at his weirdest, he usually has a reason for doing what he does, and fortunately there's no need at all to make excuses for his marvelous Schubert symphonies. Of course, he has the Concertgebouw at his beck and call, which adds no small dimension to the success of these performances, but for the most part it's all Harnoncourt's show. Fresh, exciting, provocative, you will never hear Schubert the same way again.

It is over four years since the Viennese pianist, Till Fellner, winner of the 1993 Clara Haskil Competition in Vevey, signed a contract with Erato, but since then only three major issues have appeared, all highly praised, Beethoven’s Second and Third Concertos (9/95), a solo Schubert disc (4/98) and an unusual coupling of Schumann’s Kreisleriana and the Sonata of the short-lived Julius Reubke (10/96). This Mozart coupling imaginatively brings together what Misha Donat’s excellent note describes as “two concertos in military style”. The only disc listed on the Gramophone Database with this same coupling is from Rudolf Serkin’s late and rather heavy-handed Mozart series with Abbado and the LSO. The crisp, fresh, sparkling playing of Fellner provides a total contrast, and the most relevant comparisons are with Schiff and Perahia (now only available as a 12-disc set).

"The trees are coming into leaf/Like something almost being said." Taking a cue from these lines of Philip Larkin, pianist Simone Dinnerstein casts her album of the music of J.S. Bach and Franz Schubert in poetic terms. Her understanding of the composers is summed up in her own words: "The music of Bach and Schubert share a distinctive quality, as if wordless voices were singing textless melodies." Of course, Bach and Schubert were masters of setting texts to profoundly expressive music, so it is fruitful to look for the lyrical impulse in their keyboard works and appropriate to find songful interpretations. Yet Dinnerstein doesn't merely serve up rhapsodic renditions or treat the music as some kind of tuneful vehicle for idiosyncratic or personal reveries. Her playing is quite in character for both composers, and her treatment of the material is far from self-indulgent.

Abbado’s complete Schubert symphony cycle is a benchmark recording, exhibiting a “freshness of approach and authentic Schubertian warmth and glow” (Gramophone). Not only does this collection contain the entire collection of Abbado's Schubert symphonies, it also features the added bonus of Joseph Joachim’s great orchestration of the "Grand Duo", originally for piano duet, now a virtual symphony in its own right.

Juliette Hurel's 2013 album on Naïve explores pieces for flute and piano by Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert, evoking the period between Classicism and early Romanticism. Perhaps the subtlest work of the program is Beethoven's Flute Sonata in B flat major, WoO A4, written in 1790 and fashioned under the influence of Haydn. Its sunny disposition and light textures are periodically interrupted by unexpected key changes and sudden digressions into the minor, characteristics that anticipate Beethoven's later development and mark it as a transitional work. His Serenade for flute and piano, Op. 41, is an arrangement of the Serenade for flute, violin, and viola, Op. 25, and it has a similar, if sometimes deceptive, air of Classical simplicity, which is all the more apparent because of the brevity of the movements. Only Schubert's Variations on a Theme from Die schöne Müllerin is unequivocally Romantic, and its sudden changes of mood and key make it the most fascinating piece on the disc.