舒伯特: 鋼琴奏鳴曲第14,第121號 丹尼斯·帕斯卡 鋼琴 Denis Pascal / Schubert: Piano Sonatas 14 & 21

舒伯特:鋼琴奏鳴曲第14.21號
丹尼斯·帕斯卡 鋼琴

Schubert, Time Regained
 

No composer more than Schubert bids us enter the mystery of musical composition. How can such simple graphical conventions suggest so many different movements, from hugely powerful to achingly delicate, and by what miracle do they remain as vivid now as they ever were? What I mean here is neither joy nor despair (Schubert being traditionally associated with the latter), so strongly am I convinced that everything he wrote is turned towards the light, towards acceptance and reconciliation. While Schubert lets us construct a sublime dream, he also often confronts us with the painful impossibility of realising the moments of extraordinary beauty to be found within his music. In that inaccessible paradise, that beauty for ever out of reach, we ourselves become the subject of the strange text “Mein Traum”, penned by the composer in 1822. And that in turn raises the question of legitimacy and of the choices to be made when playing these masterpieces in concert, as well of course as our attitude towards the exacting exercise of making a recording which will have to withstand repeated listening.

Disappear in order to let the music speak of our human condition, better than we ever could, of the otherwise inexpressible matter of love, friendship and life. Disappear while ceaselessly running through Schubert's vocal works, his chamber music; understand how and why the voice – not the operatic voice but that, more universal, of song – is alone the source of his boundless inspiration. Efface the contingencies of playing an instrument – piano or strings –, yielding without concession to the uninterrupted flow of a discourse whose power, and ultimately whose authority bear us off towards unsuspected regions. Neither instrument nor form is the point, even in the highly idiomatic corpus of the impromptus and the more brilliant fantasies. More than anything else, it is essential to make the connection between the current irrepressible popular enthusiasm for Schubert's music and the tangible emotion, stupor even, into which it plunged his contemporaries on first hearing, in order to understand the extent to which its force remains subversive, through pure beauty and the questions it forces us to confront, from the greyness of Metternich's authoritarian Vienna right up to the present day. Music free of all constraint, flowing unfettered from the creative wellspring of a genius who lived a free life.

Denis Pascal