Melvyn Tan is a brilliant player who is currently doing much to advance the cause of the early piano—and good for him—but I doubt whether this record will advance it much in the direction of Schubert. Not that the Impromptus cannot be adequately served by his modern replica (by Derek Adlam) of a Viennese instrument by Nanette Streicher of 1814, which is good at projecting dynamic contrasts (as in the first paragraph of the first Impromptu, the C minor) and offers plenty of colour. There is excitement to be had in following the flight of the second Impromptu, the E flat, as the triplets dip and soar through registers which sound a good deal more distinct and characterful than on the modern concert grand. Again, the instrument reveals something fresh about the main sections of the A flat piece from this set, No. 4, where the cascading broken-chord figuration can be at once tactile and free from the over-insistent quality one so often hears. I was also struck by how well the early nineteenth-century Viennese piano copes with the restless-tune-and-repeated -chord-accompaniment, so characteristic of Schubert, in the middle section of this piece: nothing the modern grand can do would sound more passionate here, and almost certainly it would be thicker and less interesting as sonority. In these C sharp minor pages Liszt comes to mind. Several times Tan made me think of him and of what Liszt must have particularly enjoyed about Schubert's writing in the Impromptus.
Yet now I've nothing much more to say about the record. The playing is skilful, in the quicker numbers notably, but as interpretation of important music it is not worth description. For Tan gives us so little behind the notes: if you want a view of them, his matter-of-fact delivery seems to be implying, you must supply that yourself. Or is it that he is maintaining an intellectual position: that in order to get back to the Impromptus as they might have sounded when new, one must cut away everything that has been read into them since? Heavens, I hope not; but he does make page after page of them sound very plain. Indeed, the second set (D935) falls so far short of what the best Schubert players have accustomed us to expect that I wondered how well Tan knew it.
The Swiss Jorg Ewald Dahler (Claves/Pinnacle), playing a slightly later Viennese piano—similar to one Weber owned—cannot rival him for speed and dexterity, and in the pieces where a whiff of virtuosity is in place he tends to sound much too careful. He's on the slow side throughout, in fact, as timings (give or take a repeat or two) show—72 minutes, over the two sets, as opposed to 58 minutes. I agree with JOC who said that his leisure sometimes does the music no good at all; and she instanced the last Impromptu of the second set, the F minor Allegro scherzando. There, Tan goes like the wind (but misses the scherzando quality). Yet, as JOC also remarked, Dahler is a caring Schubertian with a keen sense of wonder. It is a caring quality I miss so much on the new issue. Dahler may err too much in the other direction and sound laboured and a shade bloodless at times, but his attention to detail results in a more interesting document: not a great listening experience perhaps, but something thoughtful and worth examination. He is responsive to changing perspectives and harmonic colour in a way that Tan rarely is; also to those moments when Schubert makes time stand still, or at least persuades us that its passing has been suspended. If you're going to play Schubert you've got to attempt magic, it seems to me, and it's disappointing to report on an hour of him which offers nothing of that and contents itself with cultivated piano playing and brilliance elegantly brought off.
The recording was made at The Maltings, Snape in 1987. The Swiss one is older (1975), more domestic in character but in no way inferior in range of colour and dynamics.'