Piers Lane - Schubert: Chamber Works (2015)

The electrifying partnership of Tasmin Little and Piers Lane returns in this unique double-album featuring the complete works by Schubert for violin and piano, combined with the ‘Arpeggione’ Sonata and Adagio in E flat for piano trio, an unusual collection of highly emotional masterpieces. Little and Lane have enjoyed a long-standing collaboration both on stage and in recordings. They are joined by the cellist Tim Hugh, ‘a musician with a compelling insight into the creative urge behind the notes’ (The Times).

Schubert himself was a highly competent pianist and violinist, and his first pieces for violin and piano, composed when he was nineteen, have always been regarded as proper sonatas, although published as ‘sonatinas’ by Diabelli, perhaps because of their relative brevity.

There is little new to say about the monumental ‘Arpeggione’; but Schubert’s works for violin and piano are a treasured preparation for the immediacy found in both exuberant and anguished moments of this Sonata.

The Rondeau brillant, Fantasie, and Adagio are later pieces, making use of a valuable resource which was not a major ingredient in the early works: virtuosity. Gramophone has already praised the ‘complete understanding and spontaneity’ of the artists, who ‘bring moments of true musical virtuosity’ to their first album (CHAN10749).