Schubert Badura

In this recording of the complete piano sonatas on period instruments, the Viennese master Paul Badura-Skoda delivers the work of a lifetime: Schubert's music with his passion, his suffering, and that inimitable tone which makes his native city the place so essentially and existentially identified with music. This collection of the twenty Sonatas for period piano recorded by Paul Badura-Skoda on the instruments in his own collection has every chance of being considered by posterity as one of the most creative and most significant achievements.

Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler already enjoyed a worldwide legendary standing during his lifetime - he was considered the German conductor and performances were greeted with rapturous applause. Today, more than 50 years after his death, Wilhelm Furtwangler is still an icon and his work has become an integral part ofthe music scene.

Pianist Anna Malikova cultivates a big, singing tone and a generous, lyrical style that couldn’t befit Schubert’s “little” A major sonata better. Her impressively even, pearl-like scales and dynamic thrust in the finale, for example, leave Maria João Pires’ recent DG traversal at the starting gate while looking Richter’s reference version squarely in the eye. Her flexible phrasing of the first movement proves every bit as stylish and “echt-Viennese” as Paul Badura-Skoda’s rendition, but with a surer technique. Unlike Richter or András Schiff, Malikova doesn’t repeat the first-movement development and recapitulation, which is just as well.