SCHUBERT PIANO WORKS, Vol. 7 = Piano Sonata in E-flat Major, D 568; Piano Sonata in G Major, D 894 “Fantasy-Sonata”; Gretchen am Spinnrade, D118 (arr. Liszt); Wohin? D795 (arr. Liszt) – Barry Douglas, piano – CHANDOS CHAN 20289 (77:55) [Distr. by Naxos] *****:
Irish pianist Barry Douglas (b.1960) came to renown with his 1986 Gold Medal at the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow. Subsequently, he has directed the Camerata Ireland, an all-Irish orchestra, and set down recorded surveys of Brahms and the Tchaikovsky piano concertos. In January 2021 Douglas earned appointment as Commander of the British Empire for his services to music and community relations.
For this volume of Schubert, recorded 3-4 April 2024, Douglas plays Steinway Model D concert grand, the production and sound engineering by Jonathan Cooper.
Douglas opens with Schubert’s 1826 Sonata in E-flat Major, a re-working on an earlier version of itself as an 1817 Sonata in D-flat, D 567, here posed as a relaxed lyric predominantly in triple time. The outer movements indicate moderato as the effective means of maintaining the ease of expression, the emphasis on poetic musing rather than heaven-storming gestures. Douglas consistently captures the buoyant verve in the first movement, Allegro moderato, even if moments of dramatic urgency invoke a comparison with Beethoven. The new theme at the dominant enjoys a flowery sense of a rural dance with a firm, somewhat menaced, bass line. The coda offers a silken, suave closure to an extended moment of lyrical freedom.
The Andante molto proceeds in G minor, a tenderly passionate expression of both angst and emotional security. At moments, the music suggests a fiercely martial temper, only to relent into spacious musing. Schubert’s ostinato figures inject a sense of impending fate, while the upper voice struggles to liberate itself from earthly cares. The ensuing minuet, Allegretto, extends the sense of introspection, often in triple-time parlando figures, while the Trio section exploits dotted rhythm and a melody in five-bar phrases.
The last movement, Allegro moderato, testifies to Schubert’s late style habit of introducing new themes in his development sections of the sonata form, here set in 6/8 and singing cantabile, complemented by passing dissonances and the restrained use of forte and the one ff designation. Douglas realizes a gentle series of syncopations and moments of counterpoint that add to the unassuming charm of this quirky but compelling work.
Schubert’s great G Major Sonata (October 1826) came to this auditor via Wilhelm Kempff, who revealed its poignantly majestic, often arresting, shifts of mood and temper, earning it the epithet, “Fantasy.” The opening movement, an expansive Molto moderato e cantabile, with its stately hesitancy of nine measures, has generous sonority from Douglas, who relishes its more than passing affinities with Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. The music ascends aerially then plummets at key junctures to instill in us an arrestingly unorthodox sense of drama, the secondary tune and later development section in color modes, first of B and later G minor and B-flat minor. Douglas emphasizes the extraordinarily contemplative aspect of the first movement, its elongated moments of rumination interrupted by passionate, punishing gestures, even embracing rare exclamations, fff. It becomes clear why Robert Schumann expressed fond admiration for this work, the last piano sonata to be published while Schubert lived, as “the most perfect in form and conception.”
Even more unique in design, the D major Andante addresses variation technique within the confines of an adjusted rondo. The plastic theme undergoes an almost incessant species of evolution, since the initial theme and the countertheme vary their repetitions so as to create a sense of two fused sets of variants, with some powerful expressions of fervent passion. The wonder lies in Schubert’s economy of means, his manipulation of his few themes in altered form, much in the manner of Beethoven, except more lyrically expressed. The relatively terse Menuetto and Trio third movement in modes of B has an initial, aggressive manner, which relents with a degree of canny mirth in the Trio.
The final movement, Allegretto, again manipulates the traditional rondo structure with aspects of sonata form in variation. The breezy delight in the emotional affect runs continuously up to an affecting tune in C minor over an uneasy Alberti bass. A wonderful Schubert lied emerges, again in variation, potent, as in the music of the Wanderer Fantasy, cross-fertilized by the rhythmic momentum of the finale of Ninth Symphony. Douglas delights in the playful genius of this music’s evolution, its witty asides and plastic permutations of a grounded idea that ultimately concludes with an allusion to its far-off opening bars, a kind of angelic “fate” motif.
Douglas concludes with two (of 56) Liszt transcriptions of Schubert songs, now made pianistically fertile: “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel” (1814) and “Whither?” (1823), each transcribed, respectively, in 1838 and 1846. “Gretchen” derives from Goethe’s Faust, a moment of voluptuous regret, recalling the allure of the man who seduced her, as Liszt’s doubled octaves add a cosmic dimension to her impassioned recollection. Liszt follows the course of the stream of Wohin? from the song cycle The Lovely Miller’s Maid. As the moving water gains symbolic power as an extension of human aspiration, the currents, physical and psychological, gain a sense of existential imperative. Lovingly performed and recorded.
—Gary Lemco
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