Mathieu Gaudet - Schubert: The Secret Melody - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Volume 11 of Mathieu Gaudet's complete Schubert piano sonatas cycle brings us the fascinating second book of Impromptus D. 935, including the immortal Theme and Variation in B flat major. The youthful Sonata no. 2 in C major D. 279 and the « Noble » Waltzes D. 969 round up this spectacular album, full of singing melodies, contrasting atmospheres and romantic drama.

Schubert Relics by pianist Mathieu Gaudet is the sixth volume in his wonderful collection The Complete Sonatas and Major Works for Piano of the great German composer Franz Schubert. This album features Schubert's Sonata No. 14 in C major, D. 840 that bears the epithet Reliquie. Shrouded in a mystery never entirely dispelled, the nickname suggests great depth of expression, a certain strangeness, and a touch of exoticism. The sonata's unfinished status has, in some ways, guarded it from the interpretive overexposure to which Schubert's most popular works have been subjected.

Schubert composed his Sonata No. 4 in A minor (D. 537), a work of unabashed Romanticism, in 1817. Whilst the outer movements are highly dramatic in character, the central slow movement features a long and enchanting melody of an almost fragile delicacy. He returned to this melody eleven years later in 1828, using it as the theme of the last movement of the Sonata No. 19 in A major D. 959, his penultimate sonata. This Allegretto is perhaps the most InchSchubertianInch of all it is generous, graceful, full of hope despite a weighty melancholy, and always in motion. Schubert's return to the melody that he had composed when he was twenty years old attests his particular love for it; it was his personal hymn, his secret melody.