Andras Schiff Clavicorde

This 53-track set features András Schiff's piano masterpieces, totaling approximately 4 hours and 55 minutes. These include Handel's Keyboard Suite in B-flat major HWV 434 - Prelude, Schumann's Song of the Dawn - No. 2, Haydn's Piano Sonata in G major Hob. XVI:40 - 2nd Movement: Presto, Smetana's Three Poetic Polkas Op. 8-1, Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 - 2nd Movement (conducted by Haitink, Staatskapelle Dresden), and more.

How many piano sonatas did Schubert write? There’s no straightforward answer because he left several unfinished. Unlike other pianists, András Schiff does not attempt to complete the movements which only survive as fragments. In his urbanely reasoned preface to the informative booklet notes he tells us why he chose to record the music on a Bösendorfer Imperial rather than a Steinway, and modestly concludes: ‘There are endless ways to approach these wonderful works and what I have done represents just the attempt of one individual performer.’

Schubert - Piano Sonatas, Impromptus - Andras Schiff (2011) {9CD Set Decca 478 3018 rec 1990-1995}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.75 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 1.47 Gb
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© 1990-95, 2011 Decca Music | 478 3018
Classical / Romantic / Piano

When András Schiff completed the recording of all of Schubert's piano sonatas in the 1990s, Decca released a box set containing all of the individual discs from the series. For this 2011 reissue, Decca goes one step further and includes Schiff's recordings of the Impromptus, the Moments musicaux, and several other shorter works. Schubert's music, along with that of Bach and Mozart, is one of the cornerstones upon which Schiff built his reputation as a thoughtful and intelligent performer. Anyone looking for a complete set of the Schubert sonatas could do much worse than to choose this one by one of the foremost Schubert interpreters of his generation.

First there was rhythm - pulsing, driving, primal rhythm. And a new word in musical terminology: Barbaro. As with sticks on skins, so with hammers on strings. The piano as one of the percussion family, the piano among the percussion family. The first and second concertos were written to be performed that way. But the rhythm had shape and direction, myriad accents, myriad subtleties. An informed primitivism. A Baroque primitivism. Then came the folkloric inflections chipped from the music of time: the crude and misshapen suddenly finding a singing voice. Like the simple melody - perhaps a childhood recollection - that emerges from the dogged rhythm of the First Concerto's second movement. András Schiff plays it like a defining moment - the piano reinvented as a singing instrument. His "parlando" (conversational) style is very much in Bartók's own image. But it's the balance here between the honed and unhoned, the brawn and beauty, the elegance and wit of this astonishing music that make these readings special.

András Schiff has recorded Bach's six partitas twice, first for Decca in 1985 and then for ECM in 2009, and both are superlative in their own ways. Schiff was then and is now a pianist possessing a fluent technique, an agile tone, and a sense of phrasing that makes counterpoint sing, but his interpretations of the Partitas have changed over 25 years. His later performances are more pointed and more poised, thoughtful, and ardent than his earlier one, but they are also less mellow and much less pedaled, with no less drive, but perhaps less lyricism. Whether Schiff's earlier or later performance appeals more will be a matter of personal taste. Less significant, perhaps, but still striking, is the difference in the quality of the sound. Decca's early digital sound, like its late stereo sound, was rich, deep, detailed, and atmospheric. ECM's late digital sound, like its early digital sound, is extremely clear and enormously immediate…