Schubert Late Piano Music by Sinkevych

Schubert died at 31. That fact never stops being devastating, and it shadows every note of the late piano music — the D. 959 sonata especially — with a weight that younger pianists can acknowledge intellectually but rarely embody. Inesa Sinkevych, who by appearances is still in her twenties, is something of an exception to that rule, and her debut recording demands to be taken seriously.

She studied in Ukraine, then Tel Aviv, then the American conservatory circuit — Manhattan School of Music, a doctorate, the competition circuit — and none of that matters except insofar as it produced a performer who has genuinely thought her way inside this repertoire rather than using it as a showcase. A young pianist with real craft reaches for Rachmaninov, for Liszt, for the kind of music that announces itself. Sinkevych reaches for Schubert. That’s already a statement.

The program opens with the twelve German dances, op. 171 — tiny pieces, most of them barely a minute, with the slightly lopsided charm of a village fiddler who’s had one too many. Here I have a reservation. Sinkevych loads some of them with rubato that the music simply can’t support at this scale; it’s like adding a sauce to something that needs to be eaten plain. The effect is occasionally over-managed, the spontaneity engineered rather than felt. Small complaint, but worth making.

The Hungarian melody in b minor recovers things quickly. This is an odd, under-performed piece — that quasi-Oriental modal coloring, the way the melody seems to circle back on itself like something overheard from a distance — and Sinkevych finds its strangeness without exoticizing it. Her tone here is wide and varied, the right hand crystalline in its upper register, the left providing a firm, unobtrusive underpinning. She doesn’t lean on that left hand the way some pianists do, turning inner voices into commentary. She keeps it structural.

The Adagio in e major, written in 1818 when Schubert was 21, is genuinely Mozartean — the young composer not yet fully himself, but already knowing how to spin a melody with unhurried grace. Sinkevych plays it straight, no special pleading, and that’s right.

Then the Impromptu in f minor, op. 142, no. 4. Familiar as it is — and it is very familiar, a recital staple since at least Clara Schumann’s time — it can still surprise. What Sinkevych does with the long crescendo building toward the return of the main theme is genuinely impressive: she shapes it as a single arc, not a series of dynamic increments, so that when the melody comes back it feels less like a reprise than like a destination arrived at after real effort. The trills are clean without being mechanical. The whole thing breathes.

But the sonata in A major is where this album earns its place in the catalog. This is among the most emotionally wide-ranging things Schubert ever wrote — and that’s saying something, given the Winterreise and the late string quintet. The first movement alone moves through playfulness, violence, desolation, and something close to radiance, sometimes within a few bars. The emotional logic is not always obvious; it has to be felt through rather than mapped. Sinkevych feels it through.

What she has — and what reminds me, at moments, of Richter’s famous live recordings of this work — is the ability to keep everything in proportion, to play a passage of apparent simplicity so that it resonates against the complexity around it. The slow movement, that strange Andantino in c-sharp minor with its almost improvisatory middle section, never loses its sense of underlying stillness even as the music erupts. The finale, which can come across as merely busy in lesser hands, here has genuine cumulative force.

I want to note one thing about her sound. Sinkevych has a touch that produces clarity without hardness — the tone opens rather than strikes, if that makes any sense. It suits Schubert, whose piano writing tends to glow rather than glitter.

The competition for the D. 959 is stiff. Radu Lupu’s recording has never been surpassed for sheer inwardness; Mitsuko Uchida brings a structural intelligence that is almost architectural; Imogen Cooper plays it as if she’s lived inside it for years. Sinkevych is not yet in that company — not quite — but she’s heading there, and this recording is evidence enough. Worth your attention.