Le ultime sonate di Schubert

[adolfo1947]

 

Dopo tante proposte, tutte degne di essere conosciute, propongo l'interpretazione "tersa ma tesa" di Paul Badura-Skoda. Un grande che purtroppo in questo forum vedo poco considerato.

Per fortuna posseggo il cofanetto con tutte le Sonate di Schubert, perché quando ebbi l'occasione di sentirlo in un recital a Desio, in cui tra l'altro proponeva anche la D960, inanellò un tale susseguirsi di note sbagliate da rendermelo ancora più simpatico. Era prossimo ai 90 anni.

Scusate l' OT, ma di lui posseggo anche il Quarto di Beethoven con Scherchen, che con quello di Maria Tipo metto in vetta alle mie preferenze.

 

[Alpine71]

@talli. Splendida l'interpretazione della Ugorskaja, con i tempi dilatati che ne amplificano, a mio modo di vedere, la bellezza.

Commovente il suo commento allegato ai file che ho scaricato:

 

 

Schubert and his “heavenly lengths” have accompanied me throughout my entire life. In this music,
time occasionally seems to stand still: the state of lingering and resting seems to predominate above
all others. We are overwhelmed with unbearable pain, with abysses of despair and hopelessness.
How can it be that the confrontation with death – so immediately present in this music – dissolves
all of a sudden into a floating, ethereal impermanence? Unexpected joy emerges, as if we were
hearing the laughing of a child.
The child’s perspective, combined with unparalleled maturity, makes up the essence of Franz Schubert’s
music as I see it. It reminds me of a passage from Schiller.
In 1795, three years before Schubert’s birth, Friedrich Schiller wrote in his treatise On Naïve and
Sentimental Poetry: Thus, for us, the child is the incarnation of the ideal: not the ideal we see fulfilled,
but one we have renounced. We are by no means moved by our perception of the child’s limits and
its helplessness, but rather by the way we conceive the child’s pure, free energy, its integrity, its
endless possibilities. A moral, sensitive person shall thus revere the child as a holy object – an
object of which the idea is so sublime that it demolishes any greatness that stems from experience.
No matter how much the object may lose in our regard when we judge it by means of practical
perception, it gains all the more richly when it is judged by ideal reasoning.
Perhaps I associate this passage with Schubert because I was a child when I had my first encounter
with his music. I can still see the scene before my eyes. It was in 1978 or 1979 in Leningrad; I was
five or six years old. Our address was Saperni Lane, House No. 10, Apartment No. 87. That’s where
the three of us lived, my mother, my father, and I, in three rooms and an immense hallway. From a
five-year-old’s perspective, the hallway seemed even longer, immeasurably large and high, its walls
covered with worn-out golden figures on my favourite green wallpaper. My mother placed flowerpots
on the windowsill. Like no one else, she knew how to create something beautiful out of nothing or
almost nothing, and to place it in the centre of one’s attention. That was one of her countless talents.
In the first room to the right of the corridor we had our Krasnyj Oktjabr‘ piano (Red October), on
which we usually practiced. There was also a wonderful old 1912 Steinway grand in the apartment,
but the neighbours in the adjacent flat showed no respite: after the first notes, they would start to
yell and bang with a broom on the wall.
I slept in the piano room on a thick mattress. Papa would often come in at four or five o’clock in the
morning to practice with the silencer on. In my sleep I would absorb the music. Whenever I couldn’t
sleep, I listened intensely to what he was playing.
We loved our Krasnyj Oktjabr‘ with its heavy touch. We would play on it constantly; my father would
accompany me on the piano and I would sing my heart out. That is how the first Schubert songs
came into my life, those from Die Schöne Müllerin: Das Wandern, Wohin?, Der Neugierige, Ungeduld,
Der Müller und der Bach and finally Gute Nacht.
At that moment I had no way of knowing that wandering in itself would play a major role in my life. Perhaps
our early encounters with music and poems can influence our future and even determine it, who knows?
Certain concerts go on living indelibly in our memory, as if they were people we love. The auditorium
bristles with the immediacy of our musical experience, the feeling that we are experiencing a unique
moment. Such concerts are engraved in time, almost as if we had a disk we could always return to.
I heard the Unfinished Symphony for the first time when I was nine years old. My mother took me
to a concert conducted by the renowned Yevgeny Mravinsky at the Leningrad Philharmonic. The
occasion is so fresh in my memory that I have the feeling it could start again at any moment. The
auditorium was bursting; no seat remained unoccupied. Mama courageously held me the entire time

on her knees (although at age nine I was no longer that small or lightweight…).
She later told me that she had never felt my body so tense. Mravinsky took the tempo of the first
movement rather slowly, perhaps not as slowly as Günter Wand, but enough to make the sixteenth-note
repetitions in the strings clearly perceptible. Then came the oboe’s entry, and the melody was taken up
by the clarinet… Then we had the E Major beauty of the second movement, that unending melody with
its harmonies oscillating between E Major and C Major; then the dramatic E Minor passage, the syncopations
that accelerate the momentum, the majestic strides, the way the melody is allowed to deploy
itself and sing out freely... The piece had me in its grip. At home I listened to it again and again. That
was a decisive encounter: profoundly moved, I felt connected with Schubert, and he never let me go.

 

The stages in my life: Leningrad (1973-1990), our abrupt flight to Berlin (1990-1992), then fifteen
years in Detmold (1992-2007) – a period just as long as in Leningrad. It is like having a second
home, but still it is not quite the same. When you are uprooted from your homeland they can plant
you anywhere, but nothing will ever be the same.
I began time in Detmold with Schubert’s Sonata in B Flat. I had just turned nineteen; I listened to any
number of recordings: of course Sviatoslav Richter, Alfred Brendel, and particularly the older generation:
Artur Schnabel, Annie Fischer, Clara Haskil, and Maria Yudina. Then I finally dared to take on the work
myself, knowing quite well that it would occupy the rest of my life. I played it in public for the first time at
a group recital in the Brahmssaal in Detmold. The auditorium was so full that people had to stand: everyone
was curious to see how the daughter of Anatol Ugorski, the new professor, would play. I found the applause
embarrassing and would have preferred to vanish on the spot. But I had overcome the first obstacle.
I worked on the Moments Musicaux with Professor Nerine Barrett, in class of whom I had the honour to
study. We were often faced with the question: how should one deal with small forms? These pieces do
not make the same technical demands on the player as large-scale works, but their subtlety requires a
great deal of inspiration and courage. One should never lose sight of the level at which one is playing:
this is art of the highest rank. Thus it is actually not easier to play these pieces than an entire sonata.
It makes me think of one of my favourite sayings: “What is important, is unimportant. Only the
unimportant is important. That is important.”
You wake up in the middle of the night. You have no idea where you are. Is this a version of reality,
or is everything just a dream? Does this music truly exist – this restless, anxious wandering to and
fro? Or are you yourself the music, part of a colossal, all-encompassing nightmare? That is the
way I feel the beginning of the first of the three posthumous Klavierstücke D.946. The key is E Flat
Minor; inner unrest sets in – the feeling of being hunted down. Such rushed passages alternate with
other sections evoking rest and inner contemplation: in B Major (!), and, later, in A Flat Major, the
episode Schubert discarded after he finished the piece. In the second Klavierstück in E Flat Major, a
similarly elaborate rondo form once again seems to grow beyond its own limits: calm and agitation
are formally placed at opposite ends than in the first piece. The C Minor “tantrum” in the first episode
is reminiscent of the moment of emotional breakdown in the Andantino movement of the great
Sonata in A Major (D.959); the second episode, in A Flat Minor, is music of infinitely quiet sadness.
In terms of technique and interpretation, this section poses a major performance challenge with its
long phrases, its eighth-note repetitions employing all fingers, and those veiled yet penetrating bells
of destiny in the bass line that weigh down the melody like logs. The third and final Klavierstück in
C Major, however, is more carefree and boisterous than almost any other piece by Schubert. With
syncopated accents designed to lead the listener astray, it sounds almost drunken and crude. The
contrasting middle section in 3/2 time (D Flat Major) revolves around itself in rhythmic monotony.
With its surreal scenes and its figures that seem lifted of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fantastic tales, this is
visionary, futuristic night music – a solitary gem within Schubert’s entire output.

 

My visit to the 1993 Salzburg Festival profoundly marked my musical outlook. Nikolaus Harnoncourt
conducted the complete Beethoven symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the
rehearsals, which I was able to attend, were a particularly formative experience. Harnoncourt encouraged
the musicians to feel, sense, and live the colours of the orchestral instruments in all their
liveliness, their bodily concreteness. Then we heard recitals with the Alban Berg Quartet playing
Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, the String Quintet in C Major, and Berg’s Lyric Suite. Neither will
I ever forget the way Sandor Végh gave the entry cue for Schubert’s Rosamunde overture: sitting in
his chair, he practically “cranked up” the orchestra with a gyrating motion in his right arm. It took
several moments for the first notes to sound, but there they were – the upbeat and the downbeat,
precisely: Ta-taaam! The musicians played together as one. It was a prime example of what conducting
is all about: timing, decision, vivid plasticity.
I never dreamt that I would actually live in Vienna, the city of music – even work there and pass on my
experience to younger generations. This privileged situation is something I regard as a great gift. It
is so overpowering that I find it almost impossible to think or talk about it without sounding trite: to
be able to walk through Vienna and get used to the idea of actually residing in the city where Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert lived out their professional lives; in the city of Gustav Mahler, who, in
my mind, comes immediately after Schubert. When you walk through Vienna, with its Gassen (lanes),
its passageways, and its labyrinths of inner courtyards, you emerge somewhere else than you expected.
This resembles the way Schubert’s music meanders and wanders – almost as if Vienna, in its topography,
was trying to imitate the Schubertian score.
In class we recently dealt with the elements of composition Schubert uses in his song Die Krähe
(The Crow) from the cycle Winterreise.
How is the poem set to music? What are the most salient elements he employs to accomplish this?
What is the accompaniment like? What is the reason for the rests, the way the musical flow is interrupted?
The students are fascinated by the crow flying above the texture and the voice that is placed
under the accompaniment. The crow flies around us in ever-expanding circles until the wings become
omnipresent. Then it all explodes; the voice is overcome by the black bird and starts cawing itself.
That’s awesome, the students say, it’s totally exceptional. It is also what makes the image so memorable:
you can’t erase them from your mind. I am reminded of William Kentridge’s video montage that
accompanied Matthias Goerne’s and Markus Hinterhäuser’s performance of Winterreise at the Vienna
Festival in 2017. Of course this music does not require illustration. But the South African visual artist
has interpreted some of the songs so memorably that his images remain ingrained in memory. More
importantly, they go on inviting us to dream and imagine other landscapes. I remember the film Mit
meinen heißen Tränen, where actor Udo Samel uncannily incarnated Schubert. When I saw the film
years ago, Samel’s interpretation seemed to me like an authentic image of the composer himself. I
am likewise reminded of the unforgettable scene from the film Winterreise, where Josef Bierbichler
sits down at a piano somewhere in a bar in Africa and sings Der Leiermann (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man)
with a forlornness that hypnotizes and profoundly affects all who are present – just like Mravinsky’s
performance of the Unfinished Symphony in Leningrad, that same Schubertian “freezing up” …
I recently visited the house where Schubert was born, with gorgeous, tidy, bright, rooms; we see
his instruments and we are moved to discover his round spectacles. The venue is well-presented:
a “must” for tourists.
Then I went on to Kettenbrückengasse 6, the apartment where Schubert died. The entrance is inconspicuous.
I walk through the rooms, I see his fortepiano, the closet, the emptiness. A lump forms in my throat.
But Schubert is there.

Somehow he is still alive.

[Alpine71]

Il richiamo al brano Il Corvo di Winterreise e il ricordo delle case di Schubert sono, purtroppo, segnaletiche della  sua consapevolezza, il chè acuisce il dolore. 

Eccolo in una delle mie versioni preferite, la Hotter/Moore:

 

 

Ho acquistato i cd del suo Clavicembalo, vi saprò dire

 

[manta]

Trovo Brendel il migliore schubertiano. Anche se nella 21 non esegue il ritornello che per me è una specie di bestemmia. Ho apprezzato molto anche Piemontesi, che - sentito in un'intervista - si ispira a Richter.

 

Non ho molto amato la 21 di Zimmerman anche se il fp dell'ottava di sol all'inizio del IV movimento è una specie di magia che non trovato in nessun altro

[Alpine71]

@manta scusa la mia ignoranza ma….chi è Piemontesi?

Io ora sto ascoltando Radu Lupu: miracolo di equilibrio e di controllo; 
ho il suo Complete Decca Recordings e mi rendo conto di averlo ascoltato troppo poco

[maverick]

12 minuti fa, Alpine71 ha scritto:

Io ora sto ascoltando Radu Lupu: miracolo di equilibrio e di controllo; 
ho il suo Complete Decca Recordings e mi rendo conto di averlo ascoltato troppo poco

come si fa a non condividere ?

Lupu l'ho apprezzato poco anch'io per molti anni, .. affascinato da altri con mani ben diverse per potenza e virtuosismo.

Ma il colore del suono che in Brahms e Schubert il vecchio leone rumeno sapeva estrarre dai tasti aveva, e ha, pochi eguali.

Peccato che non sempre la Decca gli abbia riservato un trattamento adeguato, le sue registrazioni, dal punto di vista audiofilo, a me sono sempre parse scure e attufate, .. anche troppo, e restituiscono solo in minima parte il suono che per fortuna ho avuto l'occasione di apprezzare più volte dal vivo.

Certo, .. non chiedetegli la sonata in si minore di Liszt, .. perchè quello non è il suo repertorio

[Gabrilupo]

@maverick Penso che, per noi, Schubert e Brahms bastino e avanzino😋.

Possiedo un vecchio CD antologico di Brahms e uno di Improvvisi e Momenti Musicali del grande Franz, li trovo godibili.

Certo, tu Lupu lo hai sentito dal vivo, io no.

[talli.]

@Alpine71 https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Piemontesi

[manta]

@Alpine71 Franesco Piemontesi è un pianista svizzero che ho sentito varie volte alla radio intervistato. Mi piace molto, sia come atteggiamento musicale che come pianista. Credo che su YouTube si trovino alcuen sue cose. Ha un'ottima tecnica e musicalità.

 

Cercalo, non te ne pentirai.

[manta]

@maverick Io ho un CD di Lupu che suona tre sonate di LvB, non ricordo esattamente quali (forse le solite patetica, chiaro di lunga e appassionata), ma devo dire che avevo avuto l'impressione di una interpretazione particolarmente drammatica, tutta incentrata e scovare e rivelare il lato cupo del nostro. non lo sto dicendo come difetto eh! in particolare questo significa anche che veramente si possono esaltare alcuni aspetti presenti.

 

un altro esempio è il concerto per la mano sinistra di ravel suonato da richter: come diceva quirino principe è l'interpretazione che tira fuori l'anima russa di quel concerto. vero (anche se in questo caso non mi è piaciuta... ma io e richter non abbiamo un buon rapporto)

[Alpine71]

@manta Grazie per la segnalazione!

Intanto ho ascoltato l D960 del gigantesco Lazar Berman.

Col suo suono pieno, rotondo a me è piaciuto tantissimo ma comprendo che possa produrre qualche perplessità

[prometheus]

@Alpine71 l’ho sentita dal vivo pochi mesi prima che ci lasciasse..

[jakob1965]

Che disco (CD) - meraviglioso:

 

[jakob1965]

Ma anche:

 

[Grancolauro]

@manta certo che è strano: senza offesa ma se dovessi fare una graduatoria tra le tre versioni che citi le metterei in ordine inverso rispetto al tuo 🙂.

Zimerman di magie ne fa tante nella sonata 21. L’Andante sostenuto è a dir poco miracoloso. Zimerman ha un controllo assoluto della tastiera e estrae dal pianoforte nuances timbriche incredibili. Ogni singola nota sembra cesellata nella cera con profondità diverse. Brendel sta dal lato opposto. Insigne maestro del fraseggio ma suono spesso un po’ gridato e poco controllato. A metà strada tra i due, ma più vicino a Brendel, metterei Piemontesi. Anche lui ha un approccio un po’ troppo aggressivo alla tastiera in Schubert, per i miei gusti. Poi a volte esagera con gli impulsi ritmici, ad esempio nello Scherzo della D960. Ma sono sottigliezze, sono tutte interpretazioni da ascoltare.

Brendel in generale non mi fa impazzire, ma lo ammiro molto. Ricordo come fosse ieri una sua conferenza-concerto di dieci anni fa dedicata proprio a Schubert. Fu davvero appassionante, e Brendel quella volta dimostrò non solo una cultura enciclopedica ma anche una insospettabile ironia. Un vero istrione col pubblico. Chapeau

[Alpine71]

@prometheus suonò Schubert?

 

@manta Niente male Piemontesi; avrei qualcosa da ridire sulla sua ispirazione richteriana; nell'andante in realtà Piemontesi estrae sonorità bellissime dal pianoforte, pedalizzando molto diversamente da Richter che invece è estremamente secco, arido, quasi brutale nella sonorità, specialmente nell'interpretazione di Praga 1972.

Ma (credo) questo suono sia integrato e strumentale all'interpretazione che vuole dare al movimento, che a mio modo di vedere resta ancora ineguagliato proprio per questo suono "primitivo", ma compensato con pause e rallentandi di una bellezza che a me sconvolge.

E lo dico da non richteriano.

[PMV]

Forse mi è sfuggito ma nessuno ha citato Artur Schnabel. Lui è stato il primo a comprendere la grandezza della musica per pianoforte di Schubert e resta un punto di riferimento fondamentale. Comunque per  me Richter/Praga difficilmente superabile.

[prometheus]

@Alpine71 sì suonò la 960 e le 5 polacche di Chopin… Concerto quasi privato, inaugurava un grancoda Steinway appena acquistato dal Conservatorio e in quell’occasione ho avuto la fortuna di conoscerlo e stringergli la mano. Ricordo ancora oggi la sensazione, aveva una mano spessa e morbida come gommapiuma… pochi mesi dopo se ne andò… 😔