Schubert

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Consummation. This is what the piano music of Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) and Franz Schubert (1979-1828) have in common, the bridge that Thomas Larcher brings to this welcoming solo recital, his first for ECM. To underscore this point, he shuffles Schönberg’s Klavierstücke op. 11 with Schubert’s posthumous Klavierstücke D 946. By turns halting and didactic, the opening pairing opens into the fresh air of Schubert’s precisely syncopated revelry. The contrasts between the two composers are obvious to the ear, but to the heart Schönberg is an extended exhalation to Schubert’s inhalation. Where Schönberg plots slow, jagged caverns, Schubert runs furtively above ground in the sunshine. Yet both seem so urgent to tell their stories, offering lifelong journeys from relatively young minds.

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.

Is there a better trio than the Florestan playing today? All three members are consummate artists, outstanding instrumentalists, and ensemble players to the manner born, but it’s the playing of pianist Susan Tomes that carries these performances to their greatest heights. Since the ensemble is perfectly judged by all concerned, it may seem unjust to single out the playing of one member for special comment, but such is the extreme sophistication, the extraordinary subtlety and the expressive range of this artist that I can see no alternative. The tonal control, the exquisite shaping of phrases, the rhythmical suppleness and structural backbone are of an order seldom encountered in the playing even of many famous soloists. But what renders her playing here still more remarkable is the exemplary precision with which it’s matched to the different sonorities and qualities of attack, so-called, of the string players. And what players they are. For all of the above this is not a pianist-dominated performance, except insofar as Schubert wrote the piece that way.