This recording of Schubert's final piano sonata and some smaller works was made in 1996 but not released until 2007. The circumstances aren't explained by the booklet, which contains a good deal of biographical material uncovered by recent Schubert scholarship (and misspells the name of musicologist Susan McClary in the process). The anonymous annotator introduces us to Schubert as far from the cherubic innocent of German Romantic iconography, but as someone who "lived fast and died young," plagued by "alcohol abuse, manic depression, syphilis, and hypersexual activity." Whether or not pianist
Joshua Pierce, best known as a specialist in the music of
John Cage, had such ideas in mind while crafting his interpretations is unknown, but the music on the album fits them quite well. "There are lots of mysterious pauses in Schubert," reads the booklet, and
Pierce makes the most of them, leapfrogging the Romantic era and making Schubert into something of a troubled modern. The tension in the first movement's opening melody precedes the ominous left-hand trill at the end of the first phrase;
Pierce takes a good deal of time in the melody itself, and treats it not as a moment of repose but as a source of momentum. The first movement as a whole is fraught with forward motion interrupted by passages of near stasis; the end of the F major second subject area, especially, has an unusually fitful quality (sample the movement between the four- and five-and-a-half minute marks to hear what's going on). With a full repeat of the first movement, the rest of the work can't quite stand up to this ambitious beginning; the breezy scherzo seems out of place. But several of the smaller pieces that round out the album benefit from
Pierce's effort to turn Schubert into a radical; the 6 Moments Musicaux, D. 780, which were in fact radical, are fresh and arresting as
Pierce lingers over their mood shifts. There has been a flood of unorthodox recordings of the big Schubert sonatas around the time this came out -- perhaps there is something about the underground quality of his music that appeals to an age mistrustful of large public spectacles. Here is one more, challenging, occasionally puzzling, but never dull.