Piano Sonatas Nos 16 Op.42 & 7 Op122

"If there can be a perfect performance, this is it…beautifully done."
***** Five Stars (Pick of the Month) BBC Music Magazine (Dec 2001)

Each of the two sonatas recorded in this sixth volume of the series with Alain Planès demonstrates in its own way a compositional process peculiar to Schubert. The first of them, D.568, is the final version, probably from late on in his life, of a sonata that he had abandoned in June 1817, when he was just twenty. At the end of May 1825, Schubert put the finishing touches to another sonata, in A minor, the first he intended for publication. Here the composer generally dodges the conventional polarities so as to create an organic antithesis to the brusque dialectics of Beethoven, by saturating the piano's sonorities, by constant changes in perspective, by insidious modification of colours. 'Schubert, that master of subtle ambivalence, ceases to be intelligible each time his discourse becomes affirmative.'
(Roman Hinke)