RECORDING OF THE MONTH
Franz SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Piano Sonata No. 16 in A minor, D 845 (1825) [39:44]
Piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat major, D 960 (1828) [43:33]
Maria João Pires (piano)
rec. July 2011, Friedrich-Ebert-Halle, Hamburg-Harburg
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 477 8107 [83:24]
There are artists who are the real deal, and who are ‘great’ for one reason
or another; there are artists who become superstars and fade, and there
are those who become legendary and remain fixed forever in the firmament.
Maria João Pires is already something of a superstar, and while she seems
to have been around forever each new release seems to elevate her ever
up that scale of greatness. As soon as you hear the opening of the Piano
Sonata A minor D 845 you know this is the real deal, and that something
special is happening.
Pires’s opening Moderato is measured, but things are already
occurring which make you listen to the music with new ears. There is an
intensity in the dynamics and in those repeated notes both in the inner
lines and the melody which create something fresh; which makes one listen
as if for the first time. Pires gives this movement symphonic scale, moving
with monumental stability of tempo through Schubert’s massive and powerful
statements, as well as moments of repose which are like sleeping beasts
and passages of lyrical tenderness which turn the very furniture around
us into malleable putty. Each cycle and repeat is filled with subtle variation;
the drama unraveling is pure music which is entirely gripping and satisfying,
but which seems to resist flowery extra-musical associations. By the end
of just this one movement you wonder how Schubert is going to follow such
a magnificent masterpiece, and perhaps in this way we also understand
why in some cases he never did.
After the vast conclusion of that Moderato there is only one
way to go, and Pires is alert to the pared-down simplicity with which
the Andante opens. This movement is however destined to be on
as grand a scale as the first, and we are taken on a journey through Viennese
ballrooms, and then into chambers of the darkest tragedy… It’s like the
camera panning between scenes in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife &
Her Lover, with vivid colour and contrast defining the different
spaces and their individual moods. Pires as we know is a consummate performer
of Mozart, and you can sense her feeling this music as standing on the
shoulders of this giant, but taking his technical advancement into ever
further and distant worlds. It’s no wonder audiences and players found
these kinds of works too difficult in Schubert’s lifetime. They’re still
pretty demanding even now, especially with someone like Maria João Pires
able to reveal layers of magnificence at times only hinted at before.
Talking of new-ness, had you ever before quite realized how completely
mad the Scherzo is in this sonata? If you love your Bruckner
you will find yourself entirely immersed and involved in this strange
and angular series of fanfares and calls and stops and outbursts. Then
at 4:21 the new central section takes us somewhere completely different,
the softness of Pires’s touch creating a genuinely magical atmosphere.
The final Rondo is Schubert’s tease, romping us home with little
call-backs and suggested references which look both forward and backward,
so you could swear he was at times being as Caprice-ious as Paganini.
Comparing Pires with someone like Radu
Lupu shows where the Mozart-up approach has its strengths since, where
Lupu’s playing is poetic and fiery and perhaps more overtly impressive,
his more romantic colour ultimately has a more unifying effect, and I
find I’m missing so many of the new details I’d been picking up from Pires.
Paul
Lewis is another name to be reckoned with, and his D 845
is breathtaking indeed. I wouldn’t want to be without his performance,
but that sense of discovery with Pires is irresistible. Lewis’s Scherzo
for instance is a good two and half minutes shorter than Pires’s but I
find the eccentricity of Schubert more apparent with the latter. There
is room for both approaches, but Lewis’s is a lightening Tom & Jerry
escapade to Pires’s Brucknerian psychological edifice, and the relative
forward momentum of her final Rondo wins as a result, with Lewis’s
being rather ‘more of the same’ than an entirely new and wittily refreshing
experience.
So to the Holy Grail which is the Piano Sonata in B flat major, D
960. If like me you have a kind of unattainable ideal of this piece
in your mind then any recording is going to find it hard if not impossible
to meet such exacting demands. What Pires has with that opening Molto
moderato is the perfect atmosphere – a fairly leisurely pace but
with lyrical shape, and a depth of detail which once again is a newly-minted
experience. She is unafraid of those repeated notes which drive the inner
workings of the music like a motor, and brings out the stresses and dramas
without excess. It is here that her quote in the booklet is most telling,
“…one can have a tendency to take hold of the piece and interpret… Or,
on the contrary, one can also not take hold of it at all but quite simply
meet it as it is.” This approach is one which hopefully brings us closest
to the composer as artist rather than the performer, and we are gripped
by Schubert as much as we are by the clarity with which Pires communicates
his musical message.
I will probably never hear my ‘perfect’ D 960, but the journey
towards finding it is made all the more pleasurable through sublime performances
such as this one. If I was coming to this piece for the first time through
this performance or introducing it to someone, then I would be happy to
take Pires’s recording as a standard bearer. Her performance is not dissimilar
in timings and quality to that of Rian de Waal (see review),
though she does something remarkable with the second Andante sostenuto
movement, resisting the temptation to carry all of the notes through with
pedal in the opening bars and further on. These spread harmonic notes
are in this way given their own melodic function, and once again a revelatory
aspect of the music unfolds before our ears. Her playing here creates
exactly that kind of world-stops-turning timelessness and sense of eternity
which this listener seeks, and I treasure it warmly. The change in character
later on in this movement is also entirely in proportion, and we are elevated
onto higher planes rather than bumped into a different gear.
One of the features I liked about Rian de Waal’s performance was the way
he managed to be inclusive of the latter movements in this sonata. Pires
doesn’t give undue weight to Schubert’s lighter moments, but similarly
imbues them with wit and expressive content. There are moments in the
Scherzo which to me feel like skating on a perfectly smooth surface,
while shapes and different lights and colours pass vividly beneath your
feet. It’s a kind of weightless dance which can be quite vertigo inducing.
The final Allegro ma non troppo is that jaunty journey home,
but one in which the obstacles are of course the most interesting parts.
The occasional blackened and nightmarish tree looms over our path, but
Pires/Schubert keeps our spirits up and we overcome; heroes and heroines
all.
My goodness – I’m not sure if at 83:24 this isn’t the longest CD in my
collection, but there can be no complaints about the duration. As you
may have gathered, I am very enthusiastic about this recording. Pires
makes her anti-interpretation standpoint clear and manages to create performances
which are uniquely communicative and fresh, keeping the ageing ears of
this listener agape and agog from beginning to end. Deutsche Grammophon’s
piano sound is very good and the acoustic is balanced perfectly, creating
sufficient resonance without obscuring detail in any way. If you want
to enhance your life with as ‘perfect’ a Schubert piano disc as can be
recommended, then let this be your Elysian Field.
Dominy Clements
Schubert, as good as you are ever likely to hear him.
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