Schubert - Piano Sonata 17 [Brendel]All the Piano Sonatas written about in my Blog so far this year, are all Schubert!, hmmm, how come he's got a monopoly on my Piano Sonata time?, plus all the other posts are about Piano Sonata 21, so it's good to talk about another one of his gems.
The Austrian Alfred Brendel is now retired from performing, he will be 80 next January, he now lives in England.
I really liked the first movement of this Piano Sonata, there's an exuberance here, the whole movement feels like a Fantasia, it freewheels all over the place, never really settling on a solid structure, it's a nice fast and flowing opening, with squirming little piano runs punctuated by outbursts [0:00-1:00], the second theme is a nice skipping tune, but then there's the stumbling hesitations [1:00-1:32], a contrast is made in the middle section, changing key and into a fanfare [4:57+], and then the fanfare gets darker [5:40+], at the end the fanfare comes back to close things down [8:41+], one of Schubert's more exhilarating movements.
Here's Ivan Donchev playing the first movement on YouTube.
