Schubert Helmchen

Here are two works composed by Schubert at the very end of his short life. Schwanengesang (Swansong) was written in Vienna in the autumn of 1828. He died on 19 November at the age of thirty-one, and Die Taubenpost (Pigeon post), which closes the collection, is said to be his very last composition. The fourteen songs, by turns light-hearted, sombre and melancholy, are settings of poems by Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gabriel Seidl. In the summer of the same year he composed his String Quintet in C major, scored for two cellos, which was not premiered until 1850, at the Vienna Musikverein.

Martin Helmchen begins a complete recording of Schubert's piano sonatas, with four double albums to be released between now and 2028, the bicentenary of the composer's death. The German pianist has spent his musical life with Schubert as a companion. Having played all of his major works, he decided it was time to embark on this adventure. In his view, Schubert demands from the performer "constant virtuosity that is never needlessly complex, set against sober interiority, the exuberant joy of the Ländler, and bouts of dramatic madness".

A flourish of new recordings of Schubert's last three piano sonatas has brought interpretations as individualistic as those available for the Beethoven sonatas, which is all to the good. This one, by the rather cherubic young German pianist Martin Helmchen, offers a fine example of creative rethinking of the work. Helmchen gives the music a Beethovenian trajectory. His reading of the opening Allegro of the Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959, is initially quite odd – tentative, and a little tense – with the notes of the opening figure punched out and kept quite separate. The lyricism, usually brought to the fore here, is present only in Helmchen's gentle arpeggios.

Yes, it sounds crazy to make yet another recording of Schubert's Trout Quintet a "reference recording", particularly given the number of really good ones already in circulation. Never mind. There is no finer performance available, and certainly none better recorded: gorgeous, perfectly natural sound whether in regular stereo or SACD surround-sound. So what makes this performance so special? First, and speaking generally, this has got to be one of the most shapely, elegant, and effortlessly flowing versions ever committed to disc.