Schubert - Lebenssturme: Music for Piano 4-hands
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Label: Linn
Cat No: CKD593
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Chamber
Release Date: 9th April 2020
Contents
Works
Allegro in A minor, op.144 D947 'Lebenssturme'Fantasia in F minor for piano duet, op.103 D940
Rondo in A major for piano duet, D951
Rondo in D major for piano duet, D608
Sonata in B flat major for piano 4 hands, op.30 D617
Artists
Duo Pleyel (Richard Egarr and Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya)Works
Allegro in A minor, op.144 D947 'Lebenssturme'Fantasia in F minor for piano duet, op.103 D940
Rondo in A major for piano duet, D951
Rondo in D major for piano duet, D608
Sonata in B flat major for piano 4 hands, op.30 D617
Artists
Duo Pleyel (Richard Egarr and Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya)About
Schubert’s great F minor Fantasie, although justly famous, represents only a small proportion of his music for piano four-hands. It is an extraordinary body of work which demonstrates the gathering importance of this compositional medium. Duo Pleyel brings this famous Fantasie into context with other lesser-known works such as the wonderfully melodic early Sonata in B flat major, written when Schubert was 21, and the two contrasting Rondos: the Rondo in D major and the Rondo in A major (Schubert’s final work for piano four-hands).
Perhaps the star composition is the passionate Allegro in A minor, written a month after the Fantasie, and sometimes known by its posthumous title “Lebensstürme”; it gives us a clear picture of Schubert’s inner life: of a man who wrote “Every night when I go to bed, I hope that I may never wake again, and every morning renews my grief.”
Duo Pleyel takes its name from Richard Egarr and Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya’s pet piano – a beautiful instrument made in 1848 by Chopin’s preferred maker, Pleyel. The Duo has been working for the past three years to bring the rich and exciting repertoire for piano four-hands to a wider public. It is particularly committed to providing mixed programmes ranging from the earliest music by Johann Christian Bach and Mozart, mixed with that by lesser-known early Romantics such as Hummel and Dussek, through to the great popular works by Fauré, Debussy and Ravel in the twentieth century.
A second recording of music for four-hands by Johann Christian Bach and Mozart will be released on Linn Records in 2021.
“Egarr’s mastery of the instrument is complete.” – Audiophile Audition
“Egarr’s playing was a model of well-defined clarity, fluid melodic style and musical spontaneity ...” – Sydney Morning Herald
“Egarr has no problem keeping our attention.” – Gramophone
“Egarr’s playing is full of energy and insight.” – BBC Music Magazine
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Rondo in D, D608
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2Sonata in B flat, D617: 1. Allegro moderato
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3Sonata in B flat, D617: 2. Andante con moto
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4Sonata in B flat, D617: 3. Allegretto
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5Fantasie in F minor, D940
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6Allegro in A minor Lebenssturme, D947
Europadisc Review
The disc opens with two of a clutch of piano-duet works that Schubert composed in 1818. The polonaise-like Rondo in D major makes a perfect curtain-raiser, its Biedermeier charm already combined with a feeling for the longer line and for effective contrasts, while the ambitious Sonata in B flat major shows Schubert flexing his expressive muscles in a larger format while still exuding the intimacy of a domestic setting. Both pieces are played with a marvellous understanding of the genre, imbued with a mixture of dance-like lilt and chamber-music rapport, most telling in the moments of carefully deployed rubato and Schubertian hesitation.
The Sonata in particular carries more than a hint of the turbulent times ahead, and these become readily apparent in the album’s centrepiece, the great F minor Fantasie: a masterpiece of the highest order not just in the piano duet genre but in the context of Schubert’s wider output. Building on the cyclic four-section of the 1822 ‘Wanderer’ Fantasie’, this is one of the great works of Schubert’s final year, and it is given a performance here that balances its almost symphonic ambitions with its close-knit intensity to telling effect. The Pleyel instrument makes up in incisiveness for what it lacks in sheer power when compared with a modern concert grand, and at Nepomnyashchaya and Egarr’s expertly chosen tempi the listener is swept away in the drama of it all: the aching beauty of the opening section, the jagged double-dotted figuration of the ‘slow movement’, the Beethovenian bustle of the extended ‘scherzo’, the inexorable return of the opening music, the build-up of tension in the fugue that follows, and the final devastating recall of the main theme. It’s almost impossible to imagine the decay of the final chord being as effective on a modern instrument.
Two more works from 1828 round out the disc: the Rondo in A major and a piece with which it is often paired, the Allegro in A minor, given the subtitle ‘Lebensstürme’ (‘storms of life’) by Diabelli when it was eventually published twenty-two years later. However inauthentic it may be, it sums up the work’s tempestuous character, a twelve-minute tone-poem which once again seems to be crying out orchestral clothes, yet whose intensely personal nature can really only be captured when played by two players at one instrument. What Schubert scholar John Reed referred to as this piece’s ‘Promethean spirit’ is unerringly evoked by the Duo Pleyel, fully justifying their choice of instrument and ensuring that the disc as a whole ends with an exceptionally powerful punch. The programme as a whole, recorded back in February 2019, seems almost tailor-made for our present times, offering both an outlet for pent-up feelings and the prospect of hope beyond suffering. Two centuries on, Schubert’s voice is as relevant and as much needed as ever.
Reviews
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