Franz SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Schubert on Tape
Impromptus, D. 899 [26:27]
Moments musicaux, D. 780 [27:04]
Edna Stern (piano)
rec. 2021, Snap Studios, London, England
ORCHID CLASSICS ORC100192 [53:38]
The principal conceits of this album, entitled Schubert on Tape, are to display pianist Edna Stern’s sentimental idealization of a past never experienced (and tolerated) in the flesh and hairshirt penance for present improvements sought after and created by those who did. Her treatment of the Impromptus, D. 899 and Moments musicaux on this disc is the phonographic equivalent of social media denizens who regularly usurp current events to make it about themselves: Schubert is a frame for Stern and (to employ the contemporary marketing jargon now metastasized throughout wider public discourse) her “brand.”
Stern’s liner notes devote in excess of four pages not to Schubert, her interpretive ideas, or even her personal feelings about his music, but to explaining - in the vague platitudes typical of “Vinyl Renaissance” cultists - her personal belief in the “undeniable” superiority of analog recordings; inveighing against the corruptive influence of digital recordings and compact discs as teetotalers once did on happy hour crowds. (Her superficial notes on Schubert’s music, in fact, take up less than two pages.) She justifies her recording methods by citing her “favorite pianists from the golden age such as Yves Nat, Wilhelm Kempff, Cziffra, Backhaus, and many others,” all of whom she asserts preferred to record on analog (as if they had a choice in the matter to begin with since most were dead or retired by the time digital arrived).
All this subjective hokum would be forgivable if it resulted in compelling performances, but they do not. Although Stern writes that Schubert’s piano music “may not be Everest in terms of difficulty,” his sometimes unidiomatic writing for the keyboard can be deceptively challenging. Stern is never tripped up, gratefully, but neither does she ever achieve the “sense of freedom - even of danger - with the human and all their flaws” that she purportedly sought in these recording sessions, which aside from being recorded on analog tape were mostly made with single takes. Her playing is straightforward and well-chiseled enough, if earthbound. She is at her best when Schubert turns inward, such as in the two A-flat Moments musicaux, when his music forecasts the poet trailing off into eternity at the end of Schumann’s Kinderszenen. In the Impromptus, however, with the running notes that thread through the last three, Stern sounds discernibly strained, her sense of movement stiff. Her playing of the A-flat’s coda is downright harsh.
Tributes to golden age pianists invite comparisons to them, unflattering ones in Stern’s case. The sublimely fallible Edwin Fisher, for example, recorded these same Impromptus and Moments musicaux in conditions which were not an adult playground for childish playacting, but in his very real and up-to-date present. (Whether he would have preferred the honesty of acoustic wax cylinders over the perversive possibilities of shellac 78s and electrical recording remains unknown.) Transcending the dropped notes that Fischer characteristically spangled his recordings with, he soars in flight. Stern can only look on from below.
The production on this disc drops Stern onto a shallow soundstage that focuses on the mid-range to the detriment of the bass and upper reaches of the treble. Compare with the sumptuous, rich, and warm digital sound Ars Produktion enveloped Yunus Kaya’s recital of late Brahms. So much for the superiority of “analog warmth.”
Stern closed her liner notes by grandiloquently eulogizing her own recording: “I couldn’t help but sigh and think that it sounds human, all too human.” When Schubert on Tape finally ended, I could not help but let out a sigh too.
Néstor Castiglione
