Schubert: March D606

Gerhard Oppitz is recognized as being one of the top pianists performing internationally today. His series of Schubert’s piano works, based on his long experience with the works, showcases his superior technical control, deep intellectual pervasion, and sweeping musical realization. This ninth instalment includes dances, marches, and sonata fragments.

On his new album, Matthias Kirschnereit displays a fine sense of the nuances and rough contrasts required to follow in Schubert’s footsteps.

This CD includes Sonata in D major D850, Adagio in E major D612 and Sonata in A flat major D557. “This Series continues to be most impressive. Vermuelen must be the ideal Schubert player, and the instrument, a superbly restored Streicher und Sohn of 1826, has an astonishing range of dynamics….” Early Music Review

Artur Schnabel was born on 17 April, 1882 at Lipnik Górny, a suburb of the modern-day Polish town of Bielsko-Biala. At the time of his birth this town would have been known as Bielitz, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Schnabel died in 1951 at Axenstein in Switzerland.

He was the youngest of three children and when still a child the family moved to Vienna, where the young Schnabel took up studies with the legendary Theodor Leschetizsky, who also taught Paderewski and Moiseiwitsch. Schnabel remained a pupil of Leschetizsky's for seven years, from 1892 to 1897.

Schnabel's début took place in 1890 in Vienna and in 1900 he moved to Berlin, where he lived for 33 years. In 1905 he married the well-known contralto, Therese Behr, and the couple successfully toured the German provinces giving Lieder recitals.

The birth of their first son, Karl Ulrich, took place in 1909 and in 1912 a second boy, Stefan, was born. Karl Ulrich was to become a famous teacher and accomplished pianist: he features in two of the recordings in this set. A number of today's famous pianists studied with him, including Leon Fleisher and Peter Serkin. Stefan took up acting as a career and achieved a fair degree of success in both Germany and Hollywood.

Schnabel made his first recordings in 1930 of the Beethoven sonatas and concertos and, in 1933, the Schnabel family left Berlin a few months after Hitler took power. They lived in England for a while and in 1939 moved to the USA where, in 1944, Schnabel became an American citizen. Although resident in America, it was in Europe that he was more widely recognised and it was in London, for EMI, that Schnabel made virtually all of his great recordings.

This set of 8 CDs presents the incomparable Schnabel in a range of works by composers whose music he particularly admired and made a speciality of: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert.

Claudio Arrau was born on 6th February 1903. Such was his prodigious talent that he gave his first public recital in Santiago at the age of five.

When he was nine he was sent, with support of the Chilean Government, to study in Berlin where he was a pupil of Martin Krause at Stern’s Conservatory for six years, he never went to another teacher.

He received many awards during his student days such that his name was already in circulation when he gave extensive tours in Germany and Scandinavia following his first recital in Berlin in 1914. He embarked on a tour of Europe after WW1. Conductors of the highest calibre – Nikisch, Mengelberg and Furtwängler amongst them – accompanied him.

After a successful return visit to his homeland in 1921 he visited London the following year where he appeared in a concert with Dame Nellie Melba and Bronislaw Huberman, the violinist who, at the age of 14, had won Brahms admiration for his performance of his concerto. In 1923 he toured the USA.

He joined the staff of Stern’s Conservatory in 1924 and taught there until 1940. In Berlin he played the complete works of Bach over 12 concerts but decided that the piano was not the instrument for these works and never played them in public again. Leaving Berlin in 1940 he returned to

Chile, where in its capital, Santiago, he founded a piano school. It was whilst on a highly successful tour of the USA during the following year that he decided to settle his family in New York.

Arrau’s reputation is built on his special affinity for the music of Brahms, Schumann, Liszt, Chopin and, above all, Beethoven whose complete sonatas he played in many major cities. His performances had all the virtuoso technique required but it was accomplished without the least ostentation; for him the music was what should remain in the audience’s ear and should not be disturbed by the flamboyance of the pianist in the audience’s eye.

Twenty years have passed since he departed but these recordings will bring back happy memories for all those lucky enough ever to have attended his concerts.

Schubert’s piano sonatas span his creative life, from the No.1 D157 of 1815 to the three great sonatas of 1828 D958, 959 and 960. Schubert’s sonatas are a world away from Beethoven’s dramatic statements, and from the overtly virtuosic sonatas of Hummel and Weber. They contain some of his most profound music, the world of song never being far away. Drawing out the ever present patina of sadness, even in what sounds like ‘happy’music is essential if the performer is to understand this music. Some of his best loved works are for solo piano, and the Impromptus D899 and D935 are miniature masterworks, full of passion, drama, reflection and above all supreme lyricism.

Recordings made by Denon in the 1990s