Osborne/Lewis
(Hyperion)
There are six works in Steven Osborne and Paul Lewis's selection of Schubert's music for four hands at one piano. All are late works, composed in the last four years of the composer's life; all but one (the E minor Fugue D952) are substantial, while one, the Fantasie in F minor, would earn its place in any list of Schubert's supreme masterpieces. Osborne and Lewis predictably reserve their finest, most perceptive playing for the Fantasie, giving its infinitely regretful main theme a different shading on each of its appearances and colouring the work's harmonic shifts and modulations impeccably. None of their performances could be described as routine, though, even when the music is less than top drawer, and in works such as the A flat major Variations D813 and the deceptively modest-sounding Allegro in A minor D947, both of which approach the Fantasie in scale, they find emotional depths and dramas that unmistakably identify both as products of Schubert's final year.
Rating: 4/5
> 我来回应