Customer Reviews

Schubert: Piano Sonata, D.960 / 3 Klavierstücke, D.946 ~ Uchida

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The final Schubert piano sonata has always fascinated me - I've been under it's spell for over 25 years and have collected many recordings. Some of my favorites tend towards the extreme in terms of tempo - both the Valery Afanassiev recording for ECM (live from the 1985 Lockenhaus Festival) and especially Richter's performance from the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival have opening movements even slower than Uchida's. (Uchida brings it in at 21"53", where Afanassiev takes 22:45 and Richter plays at an insanely self-absorbed 25:07.) Pollini, in a more "mainstream" performance on DG, is a veritable speed demon by comparison: 18:52. But it isn't the actual tempo that is important; it's the attention to detail, and there's much to hear in this performance. At approximately halfway through the first movement, just before the development, time almost stops and we're suspended in awe before returning to a gentle landing in a more moderate approach. Listen especially to the passage from 14:30 to 15:15: if you want to hear the difference between pianissimo, pp, and ppp, they're all demonstrated with grace and fluidity. No gazing despondently into the abyss here, but a wistful, eloquent reading.

The recording itself is a bit "blended" for my taste - not as sharp (maybe "brittle" is the word?)as I'd like it to be, but again, perfectly acceptable and more a matter of taste. This is a warmer, more diffuse sound than on many other recordings I've heard, and although you don't lose any notes, they aren't as "highlighted" as some.

This doesn't displace the Richter as my *favorite* performance, but then again, I've listened to that one for years and years. But this is certainly VERY highly recommendable as a first recording to own, and I know that I'll be listening to it many times for it's own special qualities.

The mixed reviews of this album reflect how strongly Uchida personalizes this music. If you like what she does: Wow! And if not, it will leave you cold. I've owned this CD for 4 months and keep coming back to it after listening to other interpretations ranging from Brendel's powerful but rather impersonal one to Horowitz's quirky but unforgettable effort.

Traditional Japanese music uses silence as much as sound to express its meaning and, in the first two movements of D. 960, Uchida allows the silence to have its say. Try listening to some shakuhachi music and then listen to this recording again. I guarantee it will make much more sense.

Uchida isn't afraid of a thunderclap cutting through Schubert's sweetness. The bravura she brings to the powerful sections seems even more titanic after her ethereal softness.

In Schubert's solo piano music, he seems to be expressing deeply personal feelings. Hearing how a variety of artists bring his work to life is worth the time and expense. If you're on this quest, don't miss Uchida.

I've been through all the Beethoven piano sonatas, on CD and in concert, some many times, but was never as profoundly moved as when I only recently first heard the Schubert 960 in a local concert. The 22 minute first movement casts a heavenly spell. If you get only one Schubert piano sonata, this in the one. I've since collected and listened to most of them on CD(also by Uchida). The others are good to excellent, but the 960 is special. I also have the Brendel 2-CD set with the last three Schubert sonatas, which includes the 960 (also Philips). A great value and an excellent performance, but Uchida's is slightly better. More range of intensity.

Mitsuko Uchida's interpretation of the last sonata is very striking and individual. The music becomes elemental, almost approaching sounds one might hear in nature, such as the soughing of trees, or the swell of the sea - this organic cohesion is clearly very much intended, and for me suggested a vision of Schubert's music as an exploration of certain emotional states, the piano becoming a source of effects designed to conjure these emotions.
*
There seems to be some controversy over the sound quality of this recording. Ms.Uchida has obviously used a different instrument here to the rest of her cycle - this has a sonorous tone, lacking in the last detail of clarity, but eminently suited to the piece. The actual engineering seems completely acceptable to me - the acoustic is warm and slightly reverberant. The sound, then, is very much crafted by the performer to reflect her perceptions of the piece. My tastes lean towards the 'audiophile', and I found this recording very atmospheric and enjoyable - it feels like sitting a moderate distance from the stage in a sympathetically voiced auditorium.
*
My favourite interpreter of this work remains Andras Schiff, but as an intriguing alternative view this is wonderful.

If I were the recording engineer on this album, I would consider my job very well done...provided you had required me to place the mic's in another room down the hall for some reason. There is a critical mic distance beyond which you may not go, where the early reflections off the walls start to dominate the sound and this recording has clearly exceeded that.

This doesn't mean the album is worthless, it's just more suitable for backgroud music, and will disappoint if what you wanted was to sit and listen attentively to a fine Schubert performance...it will be like you've been locked out of the concert hall and have to listen from the foyer.

At last from the East a new star has arisen: Uchida owns all the demanded requisites to triumph in this difficult career. She has a magnificent color sense and reminds me to Guiomar Novaes in this aspect, besides she has a very clean phrasing with an outstanding cantabile line that reminds us to Edwin Fisher and also a superior technique of the highest caliber. Even she is still in his early ages, I think her future is simply unlimited: somehow she has filled a sensible emptiness concerning with the raising stars of the instrument. Joao Maria Pires is sublime but Uchida is much younger and I feel she is growing up so fast but without frenzy. She has selected a fundamental repertoire and I really expect for her a colossal and convincing Schumann and also expect for her Bach. Think in the Goldberg Variations, for instance.

You have to recognize the enormous difficult to any serious keyboard player to play this Schubert's Sonata and win with that performance. And even if Uchida didn't reach the peak of Richter or Schnabel, for instance, I guess the time, and the expected maturity to play this work, that easily you may consider one of the five Giants pieces in all the pianistic repertoire. But Uchida surely must have read this famous Faustus' statement: I love whose who pretend the impossible!

My best wishes for Mrs. Uchida who may be considered from now a piano legend.

The very last piano sonata by Schubert (B flat major D 960) is one of the most played and recorded of all his works. There is a plenty of valuable - and still available in market - recordings of it, despite its tiring length, stylistic difficulty and lack of immediate virtuosic effects. This abundance of recorded versions and the relentless interest in it of great pianists ever, could be the stamp of masterpiece which it definitely is. However, the pianists with a feeble technique fail to achieve compelling renditions as those with no sense of charging with sentiment each note they play do too. There is a burden of musical thoughts and deep feelings concentrated in 45 minutes of demanding music. One can even consider that both the physical and mental endurance of the performer are greatly under trial. But this considerable effort is copiously redeemed when the communion with the audiences gets its climax and the conscience of a robust musical achievement occurs.

A short list of the most inspired and recommendable recordings could be opened by those historical ones, achieved by maestros of the old times such as Richter, Schnabel, Rubinstein, Kempf, Haskil, Horowitz, Arrau, Curzon, Gulda, de Larrocha. The living pianists of the mature generations also felt a strong attraction toward this monumental valedictory sonata, most impressive accounts being owed to legendary Radu Lupu, Alfred Brendel, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Stephen Kovacevich, Murray Perahia, Andras Schiff, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Stephen Hough, Gerhard Oppitz, Maurizio Pollini, Grigory Sokolov. Even the younger virtuosos such as Paul Lewis, Lars Vogt, Alfredo Perl, Leif Ove Andsnes, Dejan Lazic, Evgeny Kissin succumbed to its charms, devoting their energies and insights in order to account good and convincing renditions.

Among the greatest living pianists, Mitsuko Uchida could have not stayed outside the list above. Her ardent temperament and solid classical knowledge (the latter, achieved in Vienna, during fruitful formation years) entitled her to tackle this peak in Schubert's catalogue with her full artistry. The result is impressive, towering on the line of intensely assumed and heart-felt versions, releasing a great deal of genuine emotion, witnessing a great empathy with the stormy - though, completely serene - valedictory pronouncement of the composer. All the four mighty movements of sonata D960 are impeccably articulated with a refined care to detail, to those small structures that finally compound an amazing overall image. For the three piano pieces (Klavierstucke D946) the forceful treatment of Uchida could seem somehow outbidden, betting only on their witty and vivid character and ignoring the leisurely playfulness they are imbued with. However, since the Sonata D960 is the powerful trump of this recording, Mitsuko Uchida's achievement here can be well considered as one of the very few landmark interpretations in years. Recommended!

I heard great things about the Uchida recording of the D.960. Also, I have taken the time to read the critical reviews in the periodicals that really care about classical music. Finally, I have studied the piece for almost 20 years as an admittedly rank amateur pianist. There are compositional, interpretive and historical aspects about the B-flat major sonata which our modern jaded ears miss unless we take the time to hear and rehear it.

I just listened again to this recording, and I find it remarkably inconsistent. I find loss of control, with muddy textures, wrong notes (edited), and clunkiness. The transcendence of the beginning theme is properly spacious, but soon she begins to speed up. The disconnect between the opening tempo and the rest of the piece is really not ok. It is a problem that is built into the music, and has to be deal with from an interpretive stance, but she has not solved it. The first movement, marked Molto moderato, has been a great point of interpretative contention. Personally, I think it can only be taken as a poetic guideline, that this is what the tempo should sound like, rather than it should involve thus-and-thus beats per minute. Uchida hits a nice molto moderato, but doesn't carry enough of that feeling through that movement.

The second movement is too slow for my ears, that is certainly a debatable topic, and my judgement should not be the final one. However, the B section then speeds up much to fast by comparison. I think this should be slower, almost having the character of an anthem.

The third movement, the scherzo, is where I find the crux of my problems with the piece. It is much much too motoric. There are aspects of the first and last movements, in which Uchida gets on a roll, and plows though what could really be meaningful phrase transitions. Schubert was a song composer, and in the best of the recordings of his songs, there is a lot of latitude in phrasing, they breathe and don't stick to the published note values. Schubert was a poet tied into a classical sonata allegro format, and many critics seem to feel that interpretive license is self-indulgent, that this approach is too New Age-y. But this is poetic music. The scherzo should dance, phrases in the outer movements should be spun out in their own time values. I don't hear enough of it here. I just think there are too many missed opportunities for greatness, given what I hear about Uchida.

The final movement has a similar issue about the inconsistency of tempi. The first theme is introduced at a leisurely pace (I like a bit faster), but quickly speeds up disproportionately, and becomes frenetic to the point of derailing (I think it does derail, but the editing muddies this).

As to alternative recordings, well, I cut my teeth on Rubenstein's LP. This is the one I fell in love with. There has been a CD issued, but I think it was a different recording. When I listen to the LP now, I find that my interpretation has moved away in many places. I didn't take to Sokolov (Naive Classical) again, because he was trying to skirt the poetry in his interpretation. Now, on to Hough (Hyperion), Kissin (RCA) and de Larrocha (Decca).

It's rare for a classical recording at Amazon to receive the full one-star to five-star treatment, but it's not hard to see why Uchida's has. Her Schubert sonata cycle has gone its own idiosyncratic way, and there are as many reasons to be irked by her self-consciousness as to be impressed by her originality. Here she plays the sonata that has always been considered the pinnacle of Schubert's piano writing, the B-flat sonata D. 960. It belongs to a wave of valedictory masterpieces left by the dying composer, as much a Schwanengeang for the keyboard as the song cycle that goes by that name.

The B-flat Sonata has been the subject of quite a number of free-thinking, even wild interpretations, my two favorite being those from Richter and Afanassiev -- the latter is practically an act of re-creation. With dozens of versions to choose form, it's weird of the Amazon reviewer to name three and then claim that their only euqal is Kyoko Tabe (who?). The classically modest readings that critics gravitate to are by Brendel, Kempff, Lupu, and Schiff, but these put me to sleep. On the more literal and austere side are the two from Schnabel and Serkin. Pollini triumphs in this music, so far as I'm concerned, because he finds the kind of through line needed to hold together a great Beethoven sonata.

Uchida does the opposite, finding endless variations -- of her own invention -- to apply to the repetitive way that the first two movements unfold. It's hard to resist this kind of tinkering, especially for Uchida, always a tinkering kind to begin with. for me, her constant inventiveness is intrusive; it seems arbitrary and external. There have been great readings that sound personal because they go deep into Schubert's ideas-- Clifford Curzon comes to mind. I find him too introspective and continue to prefer Pollini. Uchida had my mind wandering before the first movement was over, while the sublime Andante that follows is marred by preciousness.

Far better is her way with the tiller, the three Klavierstucke D. 946, which contain more mood swings in a shorter span than anything else Schubert wrote for the piano -- or anywhere else, perhaps. In this music Uchida can tinker from bar to bar and it works, given the brevity and intensity of the pieces. As a final note, I'm sorry to report that the close-up recorded sound grows hard and glaring during loud passages. Backing the microphone away would have made the instrument sound less percussive.

I've listened to Schubert's sonata D 960 (on recordings) played by Schnabel, Brendel, Richter and Tabe; none comes remotely close to the lyricism that Uchida evokes with her overt feminine interpretaion. The first movement especially, it is as if the music is sung from the artist's soul.

While many audiences seem to prefer the slow version played by Richter, to me, overly exaggerated stretches in the timing of movement one seems out of character with the rest of the piece. It doesn't appear to me that Schubert is communicating his farewell with despair, even in these last moments in his life; or else he would not have ended this last Sonata with such power and hope. In my opinion, Uchida balances the hesitations well with the silences; and fluidity with a clarity of articulation that resembles distantly to Clara Haskil.

A great piece of music never stands by itself; nor does it lie dormant solely with the composer, locked away in a certain century or time. It is always renewed in the understanding, the spirit of each different performer. It is an evocation not only of the original composer's intention, but also is a statement of timeless echo of the evolving nature of life.