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22 MOZART / BEETHOVEN / SCHUBERT
You have chosen to record Schubert’s Sonata in G Major.
It’s a magnificent work, but very tricky to interpret. In a sense, there are no
dramatic effects in this music. The first movement, Molto moderato e cantabile,
is a fantasia, but you can’t reproduce its character of ‘fantasy’ if you don’t feel it
yourself. Though it is pianistic, at the same time it’s as if Schubert had ‘forgotten’
the piano in this piece: he goes beyond the sonic constraints of the instrument. The
Menuetto, for example, is a kind of waltz that would be impossible to dance to.
And the finale is a dance whose Viennese dimension must not get lost in the speed
of performance. One has to think long and hard about how to convey the spirit of
this free dance, which also refers to singing, to the art of the lied.