Franz Schubert, András Schiff

On Sonatas & Impromptus András Schiff continues his survey of Schubert’s late piano music on a fortepiano built by Franz Brodmann in Vienna around 1820. The double album pairs the Four Impromptus D 899 with three works from 1828, the last year of Schubert’s life. These are the Three Pieces D 946 and the Sonatas in C minor D 958 and A major D 959. With these two sonatas Schiff completes his account of the last sonatas on this instrument for ECM New Series.

The recording was made in July 2016 in the Kammermusiksaal H. J. Abs of the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn. Schiff had used the same hall for his first Schubert set on the Brodmann, recorded in 2014 and issued in 2015 as ECM New Series 2425/26. Stephan Schellmann was the engineer, Georg F. Senn looked after tuning and technical assistance, and Manfred Eicher was executive producer. The booklet notes are by Misha Donat and Michael Ladenburger. Schiff finds the instrument ideally suited to Schubert: “There is something quintessentially Viennese in its timbre, its tender mellowness, its melancholic cantabilità.”

The programme is built as two pairs, each sonata preceded by a set of shorter pieces. The first disc moves from the Impromptus D 899 to the C minor Sonata. The second places the Three Pieces D 946, “impromptus in all but name” in Donat’s phrase, before the A major Sonata. The Brodmann has six octaves and four pedals (soft, bassoon, moderator and sustaining). Andrew Clements in The Guardian heard sharply contrasted colours across its registers, and pedal effects that justify Schubert markings which can seem wrong on a modern piano. In The Times, Geoff Brown singled out the last note of D 959, which keeps fading long after the reverberation seems spent.

Clements summed the set up as “a magnificent, endlessly fascinating pair of discs”. In The Independent, Michael Church called the performance of the final two sonatas revelatory. Beside the Brodmann, he wrote, “a Steinway, for all its sonic splendor, suddenly seems wildly inappropriate”. In German-speaking media, Bernhard Neuhoff of Bayerischer Rundfunk placed Schiff first among Schubert pianists since Alfred Brendel left the stage.

This is the double CD edition, ECM New Series 2535/36, first released in April 2019.