On Saturday evening I went to Carnegie Hall to hear a recital given by the great Japanese pianist Mitsuko Uchida that featured an all-Schubert program. The three sonatas performed were from various points in the composer's career but all were of the highest quality.
The program opened with the Sonata in A Minor, D. 537 (1817). This youthful work, written when the composer was only nineteen, is the first piano sonata he actually brought to completion. It was here that he really discovered his own style when composing for the piano rather than simply following the examples of Mozart and Beethoven in imitative fashion. This may in part be due to the fact that the composer had recently gained access to an excellent six-octave fortepiano on which to work out his musical ideas. Still, the D. 537 is not a fully assured work. Schubert's first three sonatas had all lacked a finale and that presented here is problematic, in particular in the long pauses that punctuate the movement. Whatever the sonata's faults, however, it is nevertheless thrilling to hear the music of one of the greatest composers for the keyboard at so early a point in his career.
The next work consisted of the first two movements of Schubert's Sonata No. 15 in C major, D. 840 (1825). These were actually the only two movements Schubert troubled to complete. Like the more famous Eighth Symphony, this is an unfinished work, most probably because Schubert was not satisfied with it and put it aside. The work's nickname, Reliquie, was given it by its publisher, C.F. Whistling, in 1861 either because he honestly thought this was Schubert's final work or, more disingenuously, because he wanted to provide to his customers a plausible reason for its incomplete state. But even without the final two movements, this is still a major accomplishment, one that prefigures the late sonatas. The critic Donald Tovey claimed that the first movement was one of Schubert's two most perfect realizations of the sonata form.
After intermission, the recital ended with a performance of Schubert's Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960 (1828). While listening to this magisterial work it's difficult to believe that Schubert's sonatas remained unappreciated and rarely played until well into the twentieth century. Even Schumann, who should have known better, had little positive to say about them. Today, of course, the late sonatas are recognized as being among Schubert's greatest creations, comparable in quality to Beethoven's own final works in the genre, and they have become mainstays of the piano repertoire. Taken together, these sonatas reflect the composer's awareness of the shortness of the time left him and convey a sense of resignation underlain by quiet grief. Their meditative aspect can be heard clearly in the opening movement of the D. 960 in which shifts in tonality create in the mind of the listener an illusion of traveling from familiar ground to an unknown destination. While the work may not have been intended by Schubert as a valedictory piece, there is nevertheless within it a keen awareness of individual mortality.
What I enjoyed most about the evening's program was that it featured works from the very beginning of Schubert's career through the very end. The audience was thus able to better understand his development as composer for piano over an eleven year period, an interval that comprised more than one-third of his tragically short life. While the D. 537 showed him still struggling to find his way, the D. 960 revealed him as a master of the medium. And certainly these seminal works could not have had a better performance than that given by Mitsuko Uchida, one of the finest pianists now active. As I've always considered her forte to be the works of Mozart and Schubert, she was on Saturday evening truly in her element . Her playing of the three sonatas can only be described as a revelation. This was without qualification the best recital I've attended this season.
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