RECITAL

Carnegie Hall
Keyboard Virtuosos

Mitsuko Uchida - Piano

ALL-SCHUBERT PROGRAM
Piano Sonata in B Major, D. 575
Piano Sonata in A Minor, D. 845
Piano Sonata in D Major, D. 850

"Mitsuko Uchida—one of the great Schubert interpreters—reveals the sweet, unforced lyricism, depth of emotion, and technical brilliance of the master’s piano sonatas as she continues a two-season exploration of these works. Sudden harmonic shifts make the B-Major Sonata one of Schubert’s most daring early works in the form. The set of variations in the A-Minor Sonata have a fluid, songlike quality, while the D-Major Sonata is a technically brilliant work with a lighthearted finale."

"During his tragically foreshortened lifetime, Franz Schubert was far better known for his vocal music than for his instrumental works. Not until the 1820s did audiences and critics grow to appreciate Schubert’s rich trove of orchestral and chamber masterpieces, ranging from symphonies to solo piano works. Even then, fewer than a quarter of his major works in these genres—including just three of his 21 piano sonatas—saw the light of publication before his death in 1828.

The three works on this evening’s program illustrate the qualities that prompted Schubert’s contemporaries to compare his piano music with Beethoven’s. In the early and comparatively short B-Major–Sonata (which Schubert wrote when he was only 20), the composer is already pushing against the formal and expressive boundaries of the genre. The sonatas in A minor and D major—both written in 1825—are notable for the grandeur of their conception (each work lasts more than 30 minutes), the richness and complexity of their tonal and thematic relationships, and the intricate interweaving of drama and lyricism.

Schubert’s propensity for bending the rules without breaking them elicited mixed reviews in his lifetime. One bemused critic tut-tutted about certain aspects of the A-Minor–Sonata, “over which one can hardly refrain from shaking one’s head a little. But once it has been shaken and one has thus acknowledged the rules … one cannot refrain from accepting it with pleasure as it is.”