Schubert spent the last years of his short life writing music that sounds, at its most unguarded, like dispatches from somewhere past ordinary feeling. The two sets of impromptus and the six Moments Musicaux — all composed in 1827 and 1828, with death closing in — are not the tragic pronouncements of a man who knew his time was short. They are something stranger than that. Intimate, digressionary, circling back on themselves with the logic of dreams rather than argument. Beethoven was building cathedrals in those same years. Schubert was sketching rooms.
András Schiff has understood this for a long time.
His recorded history with these pieces stretches back to the early 1990s, when he set down the complete Schubert piano works for Decca — a traversal that remains, alongside Radu Lupu’s quieter, more inward readings and Mitsuko Uchida’s crystalline probity, among the essential documents of this repertoire. But this DVD, carrying a copyright date of 1989, catches Schiff just before that landmark set, playing a Bösendorfer with a sound that is fuller and more resonant than what Steinways typically yield — the bass registers particularly warm, the upper octaves lustrous without brittleness.
The format is another matter. Filmed alone in a large hall — columns, long curtains behind him, the slightly forlorn atmosphere of a German or Austrian schloss pressed into service as a television studio — Schiff sits rigid and visibly self-conscious before he begins. You can see him gathering himself. Then his hands drop to the keys, and something shifts entirely.
Watch the close-ups. The concentration is absolute, the sweat on his forehead no affectation. Schiff plays these pieces with the understanding that their apparent simplicity is a trap — or rather, an invitation to reveal exactly how much or how little a pianist actually knows. The first impromptu of op. 90, in C major, opens with music so plain that it can seem like nothing at all unless a pianist hears its undertow, the harmonic ambiguity Schubert builds into what looks, on the page, like a walking bass line. Schiff hears it.
What he does with the B-flat major impromptu — the third of op. 90, the one that sounds like a lullaby and then, almost imperceptibly, doesn’t — is as fine as anything on this disc. The repeated-note figuration in the right hand floats rather than ticks. The dynamic shadings are handled without exaggeration, which is not as easy as it sounds; the temptation to sentimentalize is considerable, and most pianists give in to it at least once. Schiff doesn’t.
The Moments Musicaux present a different kind of challenge. These are shorter, more compressed, and some of them — the second, in A-flat major, the sixth, in A major — have a bleakness that is almost shocking in pieces of such small dimensions. Schiff takes the sixth with a kind of unflinching steadiness that refuses consolation, and it lands with real force.
The video is not good. Interlacing problems plague certain camera angles — at the pianist’s right, the keyboard seems to shimmer and break apart — and the production values throughout are mediocre. The camerawork is uninspired, the hall barely shown, the whole thing clearly made for broadcast rather than posterity.
None of that touches the playing. Turn off the picture if you must, and simply listen. Schiff in 1989 was already a Schubert pianist of rare authority — attentive to texture, unhurried without being slack, and deeply aware that these pieces are, as he has said himself, the keyboard equivalents of the lieder, miniature worlds with the songs’ same capacity for sudden harmonic darkness. The Bösendorfer’s particular resonance suits this music ideally; there is a warmth in the slower passages that a brighter instrument might sacrifice for clarity.
Is this the Schiff Schubert to have? Probably not — the Decca recordings are better produced, more consistently realized, and available cheaply. But this DVD captures something the studio sessions don’t quite: the sense of a great pianist alone with music he loves, slightly uncomfortable, entirely present. That is not a small thing.
