Steven Osborne’s third album of Schubert for Hyperion is the first to include one of the piano sonatas, and he has opted for the second of the three sonatas that Schubert composed in the summer of 1828, just months before his death. Superficially at least, the Sonata in A major, D959, is the most extrovert and high spirited of that final triptych, even though, in its slow movement especially, tragedy breaks through the surface. Osborne’s performance conveys an impressive sense of both the expansive scale of the four-movement work and its lyrical ebullience. He gives the opening gesture (which will return in the final moments to devastating effect) all the grandeur it needs, perfectly balanced against the delicacy of the figuration that follows, and as the performance unfolds, every detail is just as perfectly calibrated.
The six Moments Musicaux, D780, are equally well thought out, although Osborne does not seem quite as commanding and definitive in these miniatures as he does in the expanses of the sonata, in which his performance is one to set alongside the finest on record, from Rudolf Serkin (on Sony Classical) and Radu Lupu (Decca).
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