Vladimir Feltsman’s Schubert Project: Volume 6

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this year, Nimbus Records released the sixth volume in Vladimir Feltsman’s project to record the solo piano music of Franz Schubert, focusing primarily on the piano sonatas. According to the background material on the Amazon.com Web page for this recording, this release is the final installment of that project. As was discussed in the article about the fifth volume, the release schedule was more than a little uneven. Furthermore, after releasing the first four volumes as single CDs, the fifth was a two-CD album; and this is also the case for the sixth volume.

I shall not try to assess the completeness of Feltsman’s undertaking. Given the way Schubert went about his work, one can expect disagreements over what should or should not be included in a “complete sonatas” project. A more reliable benchmark is that Gilbert Schuchter’s box set of the complete piano music of Schubert contains twelve CDs, which is only four CDs more than what Feltsman recorded. In other words Feltsman may not have given an exhaustive account of everything that Schubert wrote for piano; but two-thirds of that totality is a respectable amount!

Feltsman’s sixth volume accounts for only three sonatas: D. 557 in A-flat major on the first disc and D. 157 in E major and D. 840 (“Reliquie”) on the second. The album also include two “Klavierstücke” collections, D. 459 and D. 946. Otto Erich Deutsch’s catalog identifies D. 946 as the third set of impromptus, following D. 899 and D. 935. Given that D. 946 was composed about half a year before Schubert’s death, it is easy to speculate that he had intended this to be another set of four pieces; but that is just idle musing. D. 946 and the D. 915 Allegretto in C minor are the only two pieces on this album to have been composed during the last twelve months of Schubert’s life. Another “tidbit from the catalog” is that Deutsch identifies D. 459 as a five-movement sonata in E major, thus reinforcing my claim that there is still controversy over what is and is not a sonata!

This final volume has done nothing to change my generally positive thoughts about Feltsman as an interpreter of Schubert’s music. He is not playing on a “historical” instrument; but, if I want to listen to Schubert being played on a “historically appropriate” instrument, I have plenty of sources to satisfy (if not sate) my appetite. More important is the clarity that Feltsman brings to his keyboard technique and the ways in which his expressive interpretations allow the attentive listener to relish the many exquisite details than can be mined from Schubert’s score.

In other words the journey through these six releases has been a highly satisfying one, and I look forward to revisiting these performances on later occasions.