Franz Schubert

Music

Retrospective Fragments from a Virtual 2020 – Hamelin Schubert Recital and the Parker Quartet

April 27, 2021Seth Lachterman

The streaming experience, June 27 at 5 PM, depicted Mr. Hamelin behind a view of gray skies on a rainy seacoast day replete with undulating seagulls underscoring Schubert’s somber and dark study with the neatly folded ensemble of insouciance, ribbons of color, and fleeting flights of weightlessness.

A London Summer with Huntley Dent

Elisabeth Leonskaja Plays Schubert at Wigmore Hall

July 4, 2011Huntley Dent

Borscht and tears. It's always fascinating — and enigmatic — to hear what a pianist will do with Schubert. The scores have few markings to lead the interpretation, and Schubert's balancing act between simplicity and subsumed emotions is precarious. For a long time he wasn't given the benefit of the doubt when it came to the basic issue of whether he knew how to write for the instrument. His sonatas, early and late, are marked by repetitiveness, peculiar key changes and abrupt mood swings that can seem eccentric, unless you accept that a genius knows what he's doing even if we sometimes don't. Beethoven tests a pianist's moral character; Schubert tests a pianist's ability to solve riddles.

Music

Emanuel Ax plays Schubert, Mostly Late, at Tully Scope

April 22, 2011Michael Miller

The first evening of Tully Scope devoted to the classical music of the past was no less adventurous than the first two concerts, which revolved around the work of Morton Feldman, who was one of the great musical adventurers of his generation. Emanuel Ax, a fastidious piano virtuoso who combines impeccable taste and restraint with a deep respect for the classics, is fairly new to late Schubert, as I understand. The late piano sonatas in particular, works of grand scope, rich harmony, and deep feeling, offer little in the way of purely pianistic attractions to show off Mr. Ax's fluent technique. I almost feared that his mastery of the keyboard might even get in the way of Schubert's music. These moving performances, on the contrary, went beyond mere elegance and delved deeply into the heart of Schubert's writing. Emanuel Ax did indeed approach the music as a pianist, but, as always for him, the music came first, and that led him in new directions, which he navigated in a way entirely his own.

Music

A performance in the Grand Foyer and Morgan Stanley Lobby of Alice Tully Hall (Ethel: not in Tully Scope). Photo Richard Termine.

Tully Scope, a New Festival at Lincoln Center: Preview and Concert Schedule

April 22, 2011Michael Miller

An exciting new festival at Lincoln Center will make an already busy period — February 22 to March 18 — even busier. It bears the slightly odd (and slightly clumsy, I think) name, Tully Scope Festival. But no matter, the …

Music

MTT conducts the San Francisco Symphony: Schubert, Richard Strauss

December 1, 2010Steven Kruger

Michael Tilson Thomas was looking hard for insight in Schubert last Saturday. He found it in words, if not in the music. Indeed, you might say he chose the first Entr'acte from Rosamunde for an illustration of his point. As a young man, Thomas managed to alienate the Boston Symphony for decades by talking too much, and the tendency to lecture and otherwise condescend to his audiences from the podium still remains. This time, though, the music happened to be rather forgettable, and Thomas' remarks about it more interesting. The Entr'acte seems to be part of a dry run for Schubert's "Unfinished," and MTT correctly pointed out that its harmony is headed in the direction of Mendelssohn and Schumann.

A London Summer with Huntley Dent

Two Song Recitals: Mark Padmore and Felicity Lott

July 21, 2010Huntley Dent

Sterling or plate? Great singers will always be rare, and if they take up German lieder, their scarcity reaches the vanishing point. In the opera house one never has to worry about a shortage of cheers from, well, people who don’t know any better. But lieder aficionados are specialists. A singer faces a hall, usually small, packed with sharp tastes and sharper tongues. I am of that breed. It’s not something I care to put on my resume when I give an account of my soul to Saint Peter, but no doubt I’ll make a remark about the acoustics in Paradise and spoil my chances anyway. Acoustically, London has some fine small halls, the most golden being Wigmore and Cadogan, the latter a miraculous accident when it opened in the nineties, since the building’s original use was as a Christian Science church. London appears equally lucky in the number of dedicated song recitalists it contains, but there’s the rub.

A London Summer with Huntley Dent

Leila Josefowicz plays Shostakovich and Schubert at Wigmore Hall

July 6, 2010Huntley Dent

The hollow man. Shostakovich was demoralized and spent after suffering a serious heart attack in 1964. The politically craven Symphony No. 12 and the politically courageous Symphony No. 13 had dangled him between the two poles of his nature. A visit from Benjamin Britten revived his spirits in 1967, and two years later Shostakovich produced one of his late masterpieces, the Violin Sonata, a severe work based, after Britten’s instigation, on the twelve-tone system. But as with Agon, which is twelve-tone but sounds every note like Stravinsky, the sonata’s gray, spare lament could have come from nobody but Shostakovich. It exhausts an audience, even the redoubtable Wiggies (that is, the faithful patrons of Wigmore Hall) but when a committed soloist plays it, a soul beats loudly inside the enervating despair.

Recordings

The young French pianist David Fray plays Bach keyboard concerti and Schubert solo works on disc.

June 10, 2010Steven Kruger

David Fray's recent appearances in San Francisco, performing Beethoven's Second Concerto, revealed him to be a refined, supple colorist. It was less immediately clear how bold or romantic, or indeed "Gouldian" Mr. Fray would turn out to be in music more fully under his own direction. These two new excellent CDs begin to answer this question, and to suggest, moreover, the birth of a fine conductor.