Schubert Piano Sonata D845 by Pires

Schubert spent much of 1825 in the Austrian countryside, walking, composing, writing letters of almost painful self-awareness. The Piano Sonata in A minor, D 845 came out of that summer — a work of such concentrated formal severity that it still unsettles listeners who expect from Schubert the gentle melodist, the Lied-spinner, the comfortable presence at the Viennese piano. Maria João Pires understands the severity. More than that, she seems to relish it.

The opening Moderato lands with something close to inevitability. Not slow. Not ponderous. Measured — in the way a judge is measured before pronouncing sentence.

What strikes you immediately is Pires’s handling of those repeated-note figures, the ones that pulse insistently through both the melody and the inner voices, giving the movement a rhythmic density that verges on the obsessive. Lesser pianists domesticate these passages; Pires lets them accumulate pressure. The dynamic gradations she finds within a single phrase are extraordinary — a pianissimo that doesn’t recede so much as intensify, as if the music were being compressed rather than diminished. The tempo holds with monumental steadiness through Schubert’s big architectural statements, the kind of long-breathed paragraphs that look on paper like they might sprawl, but here feel load-bearing, structural, necessary. And then the lyrical episodes arrive and the air changes entirely. The furniture shifts. You’re somewhere else.

There is a school of Schubert playing — Brendel belongs to it, and so does Radu Lupu at his best — that treats the late sonatas as philosophical discourse, music to think with rather than feel with. Pires doesn’t choose. She thinks and feels simultaneously, and the result is a reading that resists the flowery extramusical associations that sometimes cling to Schubert like ivy on a ruin.

By the time the Moderato concludes, the question of how to follow it is already pressing. Schubert’s answer in the Andante is to pare things back — at first. A bare, almost tentative opening, the texture stripped down to something close to song. But Pires knows, and makes you feel, that this simplicity is a gathering of forces rather than a relaxation of them. The movement builds through contrasts of startling vividness: passages of Viennese social grace that suddenly darken at the edges, moments of lyrical warmth that curdle into something more troubled. Pires has spent decades with Mozart, and that training shows here — not as imitation but as a kind of inherited clarity, a sense of how to articulate a long line without losing the interior architecture.

D 960 is the other matter entirely. The B-flat major sonata — Schubert’s last, completed weeks before his death at thirty-one — has attracted a staggering range of interpretive approaches, from the vast, almost geological patience of Wilhelm Kempff’s 1967 DG disc to the more urgent, emotionally volatile account Sviatoslav Richter gave in various live performances. Pires finds her own path, as she always does.

The famous trill in the bass of the opening movement — that low G-flat that materializes without warning beneath the second theme — is one of the most disquieting gestures in all of piano music. A reminder, perhaps, that what sounds like serenity in Schubert is always serenity of a particular kind: hard-won, shadowed, aware of what it costs. Pires lets the trill register without dramatizing it. The effect is more disturbing for the restraint.

What she brings to the Andante sostenuto is rarer still. This movement has an almost unbearable quality of sustained valediction — Schubert at his most inward, his most alone — and Pires honors that without sentimentalizing it. The tempo is unhurried but never static. Each phrase breathes. The silences between phrases breathe too.

The Scherzo bounces with an almost defiant energy, and Pires plays it with a lightness that provides exactly the relief the structure demands, before the finale — that strange, ruminative movement that some listeners have found anticlimactic and that actually requires the entire preceding architecture to justify its reticence — arrives and completes the journey.

This is one of the most satisfying Schubert sonata recordings in a catalog that includes formidable competition. Not the last word — there isn’t one, in Schubert — but close enough that the question hardly matters.