Romanian-German pianist Herbert Schuch here offers a Schubert sonata recording that avoids the three final masterpieces yet succeeds in conveying the heft toward which Schubert was striving in several of his earlier works. The massive Piano Sonata in G major, D. 894, composed in 1826, equals the final B flat sonata in scope. Annotator Michael Kube points out that the work was published not as a sonata but under the title "Fantasie, Andante, Menuetto und Allegretto," showing the conceptual difficulty the work (and others of ...
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Romanian-German pianist Herbert Schuch here offers a Schubert sonata recording that avoids the three final masterpieces yet succeeds in conveying the heft toward which Schubert was striving in several of his earlier works. The massive Piano Sonata in G major, D. 894, composed in 1826, equals the final B flat sonata in scope. Annotator Michael Kube points out that the work was published not as a sonata but under the title "Fantasie, Andante, Menuetto und Allegretto," showing the conceptual difficulty the work (and others of Schubert) caused the few listeners who heard them in his own time. Its long first movement is indeed something of a fantasy, less closely knit together than the B flat work but not improvisatory either. Kube puts it nicely: the movement "seems to exist in a world of its own and to be constructed of tonal surfaces." Schuch pays explicit tribute to Alfred Brendel in his own notes, and his playing here has a good deal of Brendel's careful, intellectual quality -- not exactly the thing,...
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