Schubert

Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat; 4 Impromptus; Liszt/schubert: Ständchen Khatia Buniatishvili (piano)

Sony 19075841202 82:08 mins

There may be a clue to the very-verygood-or-horrid phenomenon that is Khatia Buniatishvili in her stream of consciousness notes for this release. She writes about the feminine side

of her playing which ‘I tried for a long time to let drift away’. That may account for the supposed masculinity with which she distorts more robust dance music by Ravel, Chopin, Stravinsky and Grieg. There’s none of that here, only a hypersensitive response to the femininity in Schubert. Buniatishvili is fine-tuned to the mortality that overshadows these late masterpieces, and registers what she calls ‘the art of patience’ in mindful meditations.

Are some of them too slow?

The Andante sostenuto of the final (D960) Sonata becomes a Largo in surely the longest timing of the movement on disc. For me it worked, just, because the tonal refinement is so spellbinding and the music is the most profound, in its grief and, finally, its spiritlightening, that there is. At the start of the Sonata, Buniatishvili emulates Richter’s heavenly length, but quickly turns volatile, with an unmarked accelerando towards the climactic statement of a theme that can sound static here and plenty of tempo fluctuations throughout this great first movement. It’s good to have the D899 Impromptus presented as a sequence, from sustaining-pedal dream to fiery conclusion, inseparable in their key relations: another sonata of sorts, And the Liszt arrangement of the song ‘Ständchen’, another very slow burn, maintains the minor-tomajor enlightenment of the whole. David Nice

PERFORMANCE ★★★★

RECORDING ★★★★★