Mitsuko Uchida - Schubert: Piano Sonata D960, 3 Klavierstücke D946 (1998)

Uchida's concentration and inwardness are of a rare order in her absorbed, deeply poetic reading of the B flat Sonata. No pianist makes you so aware how much of the first two movements is marked pp or even ppp; and none conjures such subtlety of colour in the softest dynamics: listen, for instance, to her playing of the three unearthly C sharp minor chords that usher in the firstmovement development, or her timing and colouring of the breathtaking sideslip from C sharp minor to C major in the Andante. Other pianists may find a stronger undercurrent of foreboding or desperation in these two movements – though Uchida builds the development of the initial Molto moderato superbly to its dramatic climax.
But none probes more hauntingly the music's mysterious contemplative ecstasy or creates such a sense of inspired improvisation. And her limpid cantabile sonorities are always ravishing on the ear. She's equally attuned to the less rarefied world of the Scherzo and finale, the former a glistening, mercurial dance, con delicatezza indeed, the latter graceful and quixotic, with a hint of emotional ambiguity even in its ostensibly cheerful main theme and a tigerish ferocity in its sudden Beethovenian eruptions.
The coupling is generous: the three Klavierstücke, D946, composed, like the sonata, in Schubert's final year, 1828, and assembled by Brahms for publication. She brings a wonderfully impassioned sweep, with razor-sharp rhythms, to the opening of the E flat minor, No-1, and mesmerically floats its slow B major episode. She also restores the beguiling barcarolle- like episode in A flat that Schubert excised from his autograph manuscript. The recording finely captures Uchida's subtle, pellucid sound world. A revealing disc from a Schubertian of rare insight and spirituality.