British pianist Daniel Tong has performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall has often been broadcast over the BBC. He has presented lecture-recitals on the Beethoven piano sonatas and is noted for performances of a wide variety of masterworks from Dvorak to Chopin to Schubert and Schumann.

Franz Schubert's solo piano music, stemming from the Viennese Classical school, shows the influences of Beethoven, Haydn and Viennese dance music while also foreshadowing at times the sparkle and lyrical facility of Chopin. Schubert's expansive later sonatas, posses an introverted, contemplative nature which author Herbert Russcol described as more suited to listening while laying on the floor of your room at 2 o'clock in the morning than in the concert hall. This fascinating variety in which moods of cheerfulness and sadness are often mixed, draws many listeners, who collect multiple performances and interpretations of the same Schubert works. - Greg La Traille, ArkivMusic

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SCHUBERT Piano Sonata No. 20 in A, D 959. Moments musicaux, D 780 • Daniel Tong (pn) • QUARTZ 28888 (75:56)

With its legacy of Curzon, Hess, and Gerald Moore, and the expatriate presence of Perahia and Brendel, England would seem to be fertile ground for Schubert piano playing of the highest order. So it is, with Imogen Cooper, Paul Lewis, and another English pianist, Daniel Tong.

Tong’s performances of Schubert’s penultimate sonata and the Moments musicaux, recorded with flattering sound by Quartz Music and accompanied by Richard Wigmore’s knowing booklet notes, achieve an unaffected feeling that results from interpretive decisions that are generally at one with the music’s natural flow and fluctuating moods. Unlike the gifted young pianist Inessa Sinkyevich, who recently issued an all-Schubert disc containing the D 959 Sonata—self-published, and more primitively recorded—Tong’s affinity for Schubert has a depth that puts these performances in the front rank.

He’s most persuasive in the most leisurely, songful music: the second and sixth of the Moments receive the finest performances here. Played straightforwardly with unwavering rhythm and flawless voicing, Tong well captures their stillness and tenderness. No. 6, the profoundest and slowest of the set is, interestingly, marked Allegretto, a cautionary communication to the pianist to maintain an underlying pulse, and Tong achieves this. Other movements, while undeniably well played, are less well characterized. No. 5 would benefit from more vehemence, a quality that doesn’t seem to be strong in Tong’s temperament, and No. 4’s careful, slow paced reading disappoints. The outer sections of the piece offer more than Bachian counterpoint, if allowed to move faster in a less literal fashion.

Like the sixth of the Moments musicaux, D 959’s long Finale is marked Allegretto. In this case, it’s an indication that the movement should feel more leisurely than an Allegro. Tong’s tempo for it is fine, but his performance comes across as careful rather than carefree. I wish that he had let the second subject move forward, rather than keeping things so metronomic. Schnabel, with his uniquely transparent-sounding accompaniments, manages to make this movement, and the whole Sonata, seem not at all long. He lets the Finale flow freely, unafraid to create a little controlled chaos and bluster along the way. No other pianist has brought Schnabel’s imaginative pacing and constant creation of changing colors to a recording of this work.

If not on Schnabel’s exalted level, Tong’s D 959 well captures the Sonata’s varied moods: the majesty and overall lyricism of the first movement, the second movement’s “ghostly barcarolle” (Schnabel’s description) with its shift to wild fantasy in its middle section, and charming lightness in the Scherzo, done, again, at a slightly relaxed tempo.

FANFARE: Paul Orgel