Schubert

Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to the Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition), Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team. For the first time, the listener and interested reader can follow Schubert’s textual alterations and can appreciate the importance the written word had for the composer. The project’s artistic advisor is the pianist Ulrich Eisenlohr, who has chosen German-speaking singers who represent the élite of today’s young German Lieder singers.

Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition), Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team. In this second volume devoted to the poems of Schubert’s friends, the texts are much more than sentimental melodrama for they convey coded meanings about the real conditions of life, while the composer’s settings revolve around such themes as hope and disappointment, Utopia and disillusionment, religion and loss of faith.

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.

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.

This is a beautiful, heartwarming record. Schubert's part-songs, originally written for friendly gatherings at home, have never received the recognition they deserve, perhaps partly because he himself underrated them. Yet their extraordinary variety of mood, character, and texture, (often within a single song) and the inspired melodies, harmonic surprises, and magical modulations, are vintage Schubert.

Schubert’s famous Quintet needs little introduction, and is certainly the most famous work named after a fish. The commission came from Sylvester Paumgartner, wealthy mine-owner by day, amateur cellist by night, who not only suggested Schubert use his song, ‘The Trout’, for a set of variations, but also requested the unusual line-up of violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano. Unusual, but not unique, since Hummel had set the trend with his effervescent E flat Quintet and Paumgartner intended to feature the two pieces together in one of his regular soirées.

With this recital Shai Wosner declares himself a Schubertian of unfaltering authority and character. Entirely modern in style (tonally lean and sharply focused, never given to easy or sentimental options), he relishes every twist and turn in the so-called Reliquie Sonata, with its quasi-orchestral, defiantly unpianistic first movement and its astonishing second movement modulations (Alkan himself never wrote anything more boldly experimental). Unlike Richter in his monolithic recording, Wosner opts for the two completed movements rather than allowing the music to evaporate into thin air, displaying throughout a finely concentrated sense of music that achieves its vision and depth through extreme austerity.

How poor the piano literature for four hands would be without Schubert! This musical form is indebted to him for its most significant enrichment — ranging from the popular marches to works of virtually symphonic size. The roots of the genre sprang from different soils. Schubert's musical invention was so prolific that often the two hands of a pianist proved to be insufficient, and thus the performance of complicated counterpoint, the countless subsidiary themes and delicate harmonic details demanded two pianists and four hands, resembling the four parts of a string quartet.

I was amazed to discover this wonderful performance of Schubert's D.959, by a pianist who I usually consider a bad Schubertist (in the Impromptus and last sonata, for example). In this work, however, he seems to get the very essence of the music. I've listened to many good and bad recordings of the work, notably Uchida, Eschenbach, Bolet (good performances) as well as Serkin, Brendel (worse, to my taste) and many others. The only good rival of this performance is another surprise: the romantic Liszt expert Jorge Bolet (Decca, not released on CD). Perahia seems to understand Schubert magnificently in this sonata.