Distinguished pianist David Deveau returns to the Steinway & Sons label with eloquent performances of Schubert’s final two sonatas. These masterworks were composed in the last few months of his life. “The entire range of human emotional experience seems contained in the pages of these two towering works, with the slow movements providing the emotional heart of each sonata. It’s no surprise that musicians and audiences return to these pieces over and over, for solace, and for hope, and for vanquishing despair.” -David Deveau

REVIEW:

The consistent beauties of Schubert’s themes are very clear in Deveau’s readings: he lets the music flow with gentle beauty, time and again. But when Schubert indulges in a level of playfulness quite different from anything in Beethoven – in the third movement of D. 959, for example – Deveau readily accepts this element of the composer’s style. The result is that even when Schubert’s transitions are quite abrupt – or nonexistent, as the music sometimes simply stops doing one thing to start doing another – Deveau holds the material together so it emerges with greater cohesiveness than might be expected.

Deveau performs the Schubert works with care and with a clear understanding of their unique musical language, presenting them both as a culmination of Schubert’s writing for piano and as an entry point to the grander (and, for better or worse, more grandiose) Romantic-era sonatas that were still to come.

-- Infodad.com