Description
The two wonderful works that bookend Idil Biret's Schubert disc, composed just three years apart, might almost be said to represent two different Schuberts. Within tautly compressed formal lines, the "Wanderer" Fantasy achieves a monumentality that has rarely been surpassed or even approached in the solo piano medium. The A-major Sonata is written on a relatively modest scale, yet it must be said that in its own way it is just as masterly a creation as the larger Schubert works that were to follow. Laid out in three movements, it is full of the blandly melodious charm that non-Schubertians (if any such unfortunate persons still exist) usually dislike most about Schubert, but that for the happy majority forms an essential element in the personality of this most poetic of composers. At the same time, this beguiling quality is underpinned by an astonishing harmonic richness and formal subtlety... To a superficial ear, Schubert's "Wanderer" Fantasy sounds much more like a sonata than many an "official" sonata composed after his time. The paradox, however, is only apparent. When Schubert wrote his Fantasy it was, for all its Allegro-Adagio-Scherzo-Finale pattern, still too far from the traditional forms to be called a sonata. If thirty years later Liszt, for example, could with impunity fix the label on a work that has much less in common with conventional notions of sonata form, it was the "Wanderer" Fantasy itself that constituted the most crucial single step along the new path. - Bernard Jacobson (Program notes of Duszniki Festival concert, Poland 1998)
