Ian Bostridge and Leif Ove Andsnes continue their critically acclaimed collaboration by completing their Schubert sonata / lieder project with this fourth, and final, disc in the series.
With this album, Andsnes and Bostridge broaden their concept by exploring and re-discovering some of the piano and lieder fragments Schubert left behind.
They performed part of this repertoire in their celebrated recital at Carnegie Hall in May 2006. Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times: "The piano fragments were particularly moving...The most astounding work was a deceptively sprightly Allegretto in C. A rejected finale of a piano sonata perhaps? ...It was touching to hear Mr. Andsnes play this curious and difficult extended fragment with such scintillating clarity and musicianly care."
Andsnes has a very special relationship with the composer's works. He comments, "I always knew Schubert would be my great love - this repertoire speaks to me in such a profound way. It strikes a chord in me in a way that no other music does". Ian Bostridge is renowned as one of today's leading Schubert Lieder interpreters.
The four albums in this series are a fantastic introduction to Schubert's music with the unique repertoire combination offering a very broad picture on the composer's qualities.
Andsnes opens proceedings with a superlative account of the C minor Sonata, a worthy companion to the A major and B flat sonatas on earlier discs. If there is a more exuberant recording of the final tarantella i have yet to hear it.
"Andsnes's performance [of the Piano Sonata] is smooth and warmly expressive, with the final tarantella going at a galloping lick. Bostridge, too, is in fine form, evincing a tremulous vulnerability in Schubert's settings of three poems of Romantic alienation; his singing suggests a great surrounding stillness.
"With this issue we come to the last of the Andsnes/Bostridge collaborative effort of combining piano sonatas with Lieder...The ideas was rather brilliant, and EMI is to be commended on such a fine programmatic concept.
"There is a degree of freedom in [Andsnes's] spontaneous sounding readings, and he is well matched by the tenor, Ian Bostridge, in glowing voice.
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