It is almost beyond debate by now that playing music on the instruments for which it was written yields, at the very least, insights not available when it is heard on modern instruments, and at best more satisfying interpretations all around. The trouble is that that's not exactly what's happening in this release by veteran British keyboardist
Peter Katin. The instrument used is an 1832 square piano made by the Clementi firm in London -- an instrument with which Schubert, who never traveled to England, would have been unfamiliar. The square piano is a rectangular box that filled a role similar to that of the upright piano of today: it was a domestic instrument, meant to be heard in a drawing room, not a hall. The size is right for Schubert, who wrote much of his music for small groups of like-minded associates, and
Katin is a pianist attuned to Schubert's mix of sensuous lilt and ambitious large-scale architecture in Schubert, of which the eight impromptus heard here provide splendid examples. And there are places where the Clementi piano has a delightful effect. Take the beginning of the final A flat major piece from the Four Impromptus, D. 899, where the cascades of arpeggios take on a magical air. In other places, though, the instrument doesn't seem to match the music so well. In big Beethovenian passages there's a lot of clanking of levers in the middle registers, and where a line of high notes is alone and exposed it sounds wooden and dull. This is likely to be a stimulating recording for aficionados of the fortepiano, but the average listener probably should start with other examples of music-making on a piano of the early nineteenth century, like the late Beethoven recordings by Dutch fortepianist
Paul Komen.