Franz Schubert, the quintessential Viennese early Romantic, is a conundrum. His music is easily accessible; it speaks clearly and directly in its alternating moments of cloud and sunshine. Yet to give it that simple clarity is a supremely challenging task for the interpreter, be it a symphony orchestra, a string quartet, a Lieder singer or a solo pianist.
Give the music too much punch and it starts to break up into ugly pieces. Don’t give it enough, and it sits limply by the wayside, like an overheated summer hiker.
The piano sonatas, especially the later ones, are an especial challenge, filled with stark contrasts and masses of repetition. Although these pieces are not challenging technically the way Prokofiev or even Beethoven can be, they leave the interpreter utterly exposed in every way, much like Michelangelo’s David.
Harmonia Mundi has just released a set of four late sonatas – D784, 958, 959, 960 – recorded by British pianist Paul Lewis, one of our generation’s definitive Schubert interpreters.
Two (D959 & 960) were recorded 12 years ago. Lewis sat down to re-record the other two last year.
I’m not sure this was the best idea, given that Lewis’s vision for the music has evolved over the past decade. His older work is more blatantly pianistic, where he treats the big, loud modern concert grand piano (an instrument Schubert could never have imagined) as a wild musical beast. His recent recordings are more nuanced.
But, as anyone who was lucky enough to witness Lewis in action, performing Schubert for the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto a couple of seasons ago, he has compelling things to say all the way through. His technique has an easy confidence, and he can, when he wants to, seduce at the keyboard with a silken touch.
The overall message here is that these are great sonatas in the vein of Beethoven’s, and they get treated to every shade and texture a modern piano can wring out of its half ton of wood, metal and felt.
But I’m not sure that’s the way I like hearing those pieces played anymore – and there are plenty of alternatives to choose from.
Two of particular note, and providing some Canadian content, are the Schubert sonatas of Janina Fialkowska and Toronto teacher and Off Centre Music Salon co-artistic director, Boris Zarankin.
After a half-dozen listens to Lewis’s hard work, I put on Zarankin’s brooding, mesmerizingly still interpretations. On this album (released in 2012 by the DoReMi label) Zarankin is the anti-pianist, a keyboard anti-hero almost reluctantly peering out into the spotlight on stage, playing as if even an audience of one might be too many.
With sonatas D784 and 960, Zarankin is like a painter creating an entire canvas out of shadow rather than light.
Is this the Schubert we should be more familiar with?
Then there is Fialkowska’s 2013 album (released by ATMA Classique), featuring D664 and D894 – neither of which is in this particular set of Lewis’s.
As with her other recordings, Fialkowska manages the incredible task of making the music sound natural, unaffected, with light following dark as nonchalantly as a weak weather front blowing across a summer sky.
Is this the Schubert we should expect?
Some critics and most teachers should be able to provide clear answers to those questions. But I can’t. Instead of worrying which is the right interpretation, I suggest embracing the crazy differences between them and playing the appropriate one at the appropriate moment in one’s emotional journey — brooding in February and skipping merrily along with the breeze in June.
Being definitive is overrated.
For more information on Lewis’s Schubert escapades, visit the Harmonia Mundi site: here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
