Schubert: Piano Sonatas Nos. 9 & 16
Already well established as one of today's most sensitive interpreters ofMozart, Mitsuko Uchida has more recently brought her probing, quintessentially poetic artistry to bear on Schubert. Her accounts of the composer's final trio of sonatas (the C minor and A major sonatasand the overwhelmingly visionaryB-flat sonata) demonstrate that Uchida belongs in the company of such eminent Schubertians asSchiff,Lupu, andSchnabel. And so it is with her latest foray into Schubert's mercurial, often startlingly introspective, world. As one would expect from her grace with Mozart, Uchida commands a beautifully shaded, singing tone and poised sense of clarity, melodic and rhythmic. But when Schubert really begins to come into his own voice in this idiom (starting with the posthumously published Sonata D. 575), there's a good deal more at stake than the mere crafting of sublime melodies. Uchida manages to juggle the daring harmonic shifts, violent mood swings, edge-of-the-abyss pauses, and conversational digressions of these works and somehow sustain a compelling inward intensity. Especially spellbinding is the A minor sonata (D. 845), steeped in a melancholy that Uchida mines richly, with its hints of the greatness to come in the final sonatas. In Uchida's hands, there's even a foreshadowing past romanticism and into the 20th century.--Thomas May