Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 14 in A minor, D784

Pianist Imogen Cooper continues her critically acclaimed Schubert Live series with the third 2-CD release of the composer’s late piano music, recorded live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

The highly respected and acclaimed pianist Imogen Cooper is enjoying something of a renaissance with her ongoing series of Schubert’s solo piano works on Avie. International accolades for the recordings abound, from NPR to the BBC, Gramophone to the New York Times. Imogen continues her exploration of the composer’s late piano music with Volume 3, recorded live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in December 2009.

Schubert was the ultimate romantic and Imogen brings out the full spectrum of his complex and colourful compositions, from the gentle German Dances, D790, and pearl-like Impromptus, D899, to the turbulent A minor Sonata, D 784, and mighty B flat Sonata, D960. Imogen says: “I’m not afraid of being described as a Schubert specialist,” even though her active repertoire ranges from Bach to Thomas Adès. “He has taken up a lot of my waking time for more than 30 years. In fact, you could say that his songs and his piano music have sometimes been close to an obsession for me.” It is more than 20 years since Cooper made a live and recorded survey of all the piano music Schubert composed from early 1823 until his death in 1828 at the age of 31. “One of the reasons I’ve taken it all up again is that I feel it ten times more strongly than I did 20 years ago: the message has become more direct to me. Schubert has become even more necessary to my well-being, and I sense strongly that he is important for an audience’s well-being too.”

Schubert and Jorge Bolet may seem rare bedfellows for a virtuoso who excelled in the music of Liszt and Rachmaninov and whose lineage extended, through his teacher David Saperton, to Leopold Godowsky (Saperton's teacher). But he finds in this music both muscularity and strength and his grasp of the music's visionary and often extensive and complex structures is revelatory. Some years after this recording, Bolet recorded the Liszt transcriptions of selected Schubert Lieder for Decca, and the ability to stretch and spin a melodic line in those celebrated recordings is omnipresent in this 'pure' Schubert.

John McCabe has had one of the most distinguished and diverse careers in British music, as a pianist, composer, writer and educator.

His unusually wide sympathies as a performer cover music from the Elizabethan era to the present day, with landmark recordings of Haydn (the complete piano sonatas) and Nielsen.

The works presented on this CD, carefully chosen by McCabe for his last public recital, given at the Presteigne Festival last August, include music by Schubert and Ravel as well as a work of his own and two pieces by younger contemporaries.

The two new works – by John Casken and Emily Howard – are first recordings. The CD also contains the first recording of the substantial Tenebrae by the composer himself.

This CD is being launched during this year’s Presteigne Festival and will be released nationally shortly afterwards.

John McCabe was born in Liverpool on 21 April 1939 to a family of Irish-Scottish and German-Finnish descent, although his outlook has always remained decidedly English.

His output includes nine symphonies and a substantial body of music for his own instrument, the piano.

Vanessa Wagner studied with Jean-François Heisser and Leon Fleischer before making a series of well-regarded recordings for Lyrinx and Naïve. She moved to Nicolas Bartholomée’s Ambroisie to record Debussy and a Variations album, recommended by Classica, and now follows him to Aparte.

“Mozart and Haydn, both very human, express joy, humour and tenderness, as much as sadness, drama and tragedy; Beethoven draws us into a dialogue with the sublime; but Schubert takes us by the hand, he whispers to our innermost being, with its loneliness, its sufferings. His world is sombre, introverted and nostalgic, but sometimes it is brightened by a gentle glow of happiness – but a happiness that has become illusory and inaccessible. Joy in his works is always diffuse, never radiant. We see this in the ‘Little’ Sonata in A major D664, which is often described as a return to a haven of peace, and some people even see in it a certain joie de vivre. But its sunshine is nevertheless hazy, its smile faint, the happiness it speaks of lost and faraway.” Vanessa Wagner

Mid-2010 marks a double debut for Sarajevo-born In The Mists pianist, Ivana Gavrić, who will play at the Wigmore Hall for her first solo recital there, and in association with Champs Hill Records, release her first CD, In The Mists.

Moving to London in 1992 at the start of the Bosnian War, Ivana, the daughter of a pianist and then aged 12, studied at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Cambridge University, and the Royal College of Music.

About her, Musical Opinion recently wrote: ʻOutstandingly successful in every regard… flawless performance... a young artist who is destined for the highest rank.ʼ

This new CD, recorded recently in the Music Room at Champs Hill (from where the label takes its name), takes its title from the featured Janáček work.

About the programme, Ivana says: "The Schubert is a core around which I have constructed the programme - I have always felt comfortable playing works of Classical construction, and the A minor Sonata (D784) opens with a Slavic tint which, to me, foretells Mussorgsky. I find it important to create a journey for both the audience, and myself, that shows all the aspects of my musical personality; the introspective and haunting images in Janáčekʼs ʻIn the Mistsʼ conveys this, while the Rachmaninov pieces add passion and lyricism.”

Also featured on this CD, are Lisztʼs stunningly melodic Petrarch Sonnets, bringing the playing time to just over 73 minutes.