Schubert: Complete Piano Sonatas

Performer:	Walter Klien	Click Image To See Full Size Pic
CD Title:	Schubert: Complete Piano Sonatas
Composer:	Franz Schubert
CD INFO:	Vox Boxes 5173/4/5 6CD's
Reviewer:	Ward Botsford

Listen to A Soundtrack From This CD Excerpt used: Largo

PLAY     REQUIRES REALPLAYER

Don't have it? Get it FREE!

Review:

Schubert wrote largely in a vacuum as far as outside influences were concerned. Nowhere is this more perfectly exemplified than in his twenty-one piano sonatas written between 1815 and 1828. The composer never finished many of the earlier ones and three are fragments only.

Compare this to the Beethoven thirty two sonatas written between 1796 and 1822. Beethoven considered them to be one of the pivots of his career but Schubert seemed to be indifferent - at least until the last clutch of eight.

Yet … who knows? The psyche of Franz Peter is a mystery warped up in an enigma enclosed in a conundrum. How could he have written the vast quantities of great music he did in so short a creative lifetime?

Schubert and Beethoven lived at the same time, in the same country in the same city. Beethoven was well known to Vienna. Schubert was well known to a coterie of friends.

It is not even certain that Schubert and Beethoven ever meet. They had little in common, God knows! Beethoven who spoke his mind on every subject known to man and who did not give a tinkers damn if he offended someone and Schubert whose sole interest was music, shy and retiring.

Schubert was well aware of Beethoven and his music, of course. Whether the reverse is true is uncertain despite the charming story about Beethoven supposedly saying on his death bed, "Surely this Schubert has the divine spark!" after seeing a few songs which are supposed to be the last music the Master ever saw.

The Beethoven Sonatas are performed as a cycle more times in a year than you can count, the Schubert hardly ever if at all. They are worlds apart in content. The Beethoven rough, craggy, innovative and novel in form and design which the Schubert eschew all of these appellations and settle on his own unique combination of form and melody and a sadness the prevails them all, be the key major or minor.

I unreservedly and without reservation love the Schubert Sonatas. There is a innocence, a line of thinking, a profound bewitchment there to which I unreservedly surrender myself.

Walter Klien, who died in 1991 at the age of sixty three, was a pianist of the Vienna school that came up after the war. Badua-Skoda, Demus, Goulda, Würher and a few others. None of them 'Heaven Storming' but all solid musicians. Of these I would rank Klien very high indeed. He has made a number of records that merit you attention but none quite as fine as these Schubert Sonatas.

He may not probe the depths of the D major as does Schnabel but he has others things to offer. These include faultless technique and a quiet understanding of what sets these creations off from the norm and makes them totally unique.

The sound is fine, the piano good and the transfers excellent. Program notes - one for all three sets - are hardly profound but are fairly good in a rather small scope.

If you love Schubert this is a must buy.

Actually, this is Vox's second go around at the Schubert Sonatas. The first were in the monaural era with Frederick Würher, which were also excellent performances, although not as light or fluid as Klien's.