As in the two Schubert sonatas that recently came my way (EMI CDC7 49631-2, 9/89), so again in these shorter character pieces I enormously enjoyed Melvyn Tan's reminders, through his liveliness of finger and imagination, that even in his last years Schubert was still a very young man wholly in love with life. Nothing in the recital is more winning than the high-spirited, dance-like No. 3 of the Drei Klavierstucke. The more extrovert activity of the third, fourth and fifth of the Moments musicaux likewise reveals him at his best.
In reflective contexts, however, his predilection for fastish tempo doesn't always permit the music to speak as it can. The outstanding example is No. 6 in A flat of the Moments musicaux, in which he singularly fails to convey that mood of ''profound introspection'' so rightly promised us by LS in his insert note. Even the opening A flat theme of No. 2 is not calmly enough phrased for the disturbed minor episodes that follow to bring their full contrast. In the same way I feel he slightly hurries the idyllic main theme of the second of the Drei Klavierstucke. I, personally, also prefer a rather slower tempo for the deeply tranquil B major Andante that interrupts the breathless allegro assai in the first of these pieces. Here it's interesting to note that unlike Brendel (reviewed on page 704), he includes the second Andantino episode (subsequently removed by Schubert himself) and still, by judicious omission of repeats in the course of the piece, manages to make it sound not a note too long
In the Beethoven group, the Andante favori is perhaps marginally too fast for something originally conceived as a sonata slow movement. Fur Elise in its turn would have benefited from a simpler, steadier semiquaver flow—without those several impulsive little surges also noticeable in the opening section of the first of the Moments musicaux. Small as they are, they could, in time, grow to sound a trifle mannered. But I enjoyed the almost improvisational freedom Tan brings to the F major Variations of 1802, with their daring shifts of key, as much as his sharp-cut contours in the C minor Allegretto. His 1983 fortepiano (copied from an 1814 Nannette Streicher model) is warmly reproduced throughout, though I think more clearly and firmly in The Maltings at Snape (Moments musicaux) than in the Long Gallery of Doddington Hall, Lincoln, where everything else was recorded.'