Schubert Sigmun

This CD's main attraction for many will be Gil Shaham's velvety violin in gorgeous, largely off-beat music. Others will relish these Schubert works in arrangements that replace the piano with the expert guitar of Göran Söllscher, enhancing the impression of hearing Schubert's music in the intimate domestic setting for which it was written. Most of the works are short, melodically rich dance-based gems on which Shaham and Söllscher lavish a Romantic tonal fullness and freedom rarely heard these days. Sometimes that's a bit too much of a good thing, as works like the Violin Sonata in D veer close to the sentimental.

Schubert knew madness. He knew it to the depths of his soul and feared it. And out of his fear he wrote the greatest monument to love lost, to death lost, to madness found. He wrote Die Winterreise, the most hopeless art work ever conceived by the despairing mind of man. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is the voice of Winterreise. In small part, this is because he recorded it seven times between 1952 and 1990. In larger part, this is because he is able to transform himself into the despairing lover. Yet Fischer-Dieskau is still the most lucid and most technically controlled of madmen. As Ingmar Bergman remarked on actor Max von Sydow, "If I'd had a psychopath to present these deeply psychopathic roles, it would have been unbearable". At 55, Fischer-Dieskau returned to Winterreise in 1980, no longer the sad swain or the suicidal lover, but as a man bowed with age and burdened with an interpretive past. His voice far past freshness, Fischer-Dieskau still has something to say concerning Winterreise, indeed, about man's fate. Accompanied by the self-effacing Daniel Barenboim, Fischer-Dieskau sings of the meaninglessness of love of the pointlessness of life.

Listening to this beautifully played collection of Schubert’s piano trios, the two completed ones and the lonely single movements, I realized that this is the one recording I have that was made on fortepiano. Other favorites, including the recordings by the Beaux Arts Trio, the lesser known Trio di Trieste, and the more romantic recording by Arthur Grumiaux, Pierre Fournier, and Nikita Magaloff, are on modern instruments. That wouldn’t matter, perhaps, if the performances on this new disc were less convincing. Jan Vermeulen has been recording the Schubert sonatas to great acclaim. He now has added a recording of the trios that is clearly articulated, impassioned, at times even jaunty.

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.

Thomas Dausgaard's recordings with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra of three of Franz Schubert's middle symphonies are displays of authentic period practice in state-of-the-art reproduction, and it's a winning combination. The watchword here is clarity, because these symphonies are models of Classical form and precision, with orchestral writing that is utterly transparent and ideally balanced, so the music is only enhanced by the spacious multichannel recording and direct stream digital processing. The Swedish Chamber Orchestra offers pristine string sonorities, and the winds have the distinctive and slightly pungent timbres of the 18th and early 19th century instruments Schubert knew. Dausgaard's interpretations are clearheaded and meticulous, and it's obvious that his musicians respond to his cogent direction with energy and enthusiasm. BIS recorded these performances on different occasions between 2009 and 2011 in the Örebro Concert Hall in Sweden, so in spite of the breaks between sessions, there is consistently superb sound quality, thanks to the first-rate engineering team and the unchanging venue. Highly recommended.

Wilhelm Kempff was a master of poetic lyricism, with a wondrous keyboard touch and a breathtaking command of subtle dynamics and tonal colorations–all invaluable attributes of any Schubert interpreter. He also had the knack of holding together large structures that can often seem aimless, thus avoiding another trap many pianists fall into, that of lavishing so much attention on passing detail that Schubert's "heavenly lengths" can seem wayward wanderings. The one criticism often heard is that Kempff emphasizes poetry at the expense of drama. This magnificent set leaves that claim unsubstantiated.

“I have heard an angel sing,” wrote Schubert after he heard Paganini play in Vienna in 1828. Vilde Frang, partnered by pianist Michael Lifits, juxtaposes and links works by these two violinist-composers, who lived vastly different lives, yet are musically connected. Both found inspiration in the human voice and Frang sheds new light on Schubert’s demands for virtuosity and on Paganini’s sensitive musicality.

This was to be the end of the line for Italian word-setting by Viennese composers: once the confident sentiments that belonged to the poet Metastasio's opera seria felt the chill and threatening wind of Enlightenment and Revolution, their time was up. Even we, for the most part, prefer to remember the German-speaking Beethoven, Schubert and Haydn. So it is good to be reminded of their responses to the Italian muse (usually as part of their craft-learning student work) in this particularly well-cast recital. Central Europe, in the person of Andras Schiff meets Italy, in Cecilia Bartoli, to delightful, often revelatory effect.