When writing these last two sonatas just a couple of months before his death, Schubert was still only 31. Yet in their premature maturity, both could easily be attributed to a visionary of at least twice that age. Not, though, as played by the 33-year-old Melvyn Tan from Singapore, who prefers to confront the composer on their shared youthful ground.
His brilliant fingers never let him down. But his impulsive urgency, often manifest in questionably fast choice of tempo, is not always compatible with the deepest musical penetration as is most plain in the slow movements of both works. Not only are they too fast to reveal the profound sorrow at their heart, but also for subtleties of detail to tell, such as the rests, slurs and dots in the left-hand accompaniment to their laden melodies. The middle section of the A major Sonata's Andantino brings one of those unpredictable eruptions (there are several in his later works) when Schubert seems confronted by terrifying spectres of death. But he himself compresses all the frenzy into his own swirling semiquavers and demisemiquavers without the plunge into faster tempo that we hear from Tan in the second band at 2'24''. Though lacking the imperious poise and breadth often brought to it, this Sonata's opening Allegro is full of lively incident, with a second subject allowed the flow of a smiling song instead of slowed down into a hymn. But it was the dancing Scherzo (not hurried) that I enjoyed most.
Comparison with Dahler (Claves/Pinnacle) in the last, great B flat Sonata reveals the Swiss player, with his slower tempos, as the more introspective of the two. Always Dahler seems anxious to remind us of Schubert's confession: ''Somehow I feel that I no longer belong to this world''—and nowhere more so than in the intimacies of the first movement's development section (and, I must add, in those three heart-rending C sharp minor chords, so casually dismissed by Tan, that lead into it). But Tan scores with his greater virility in the Scherzo (not forgetting his relish of the Trio's cross-accentuation) and his more continuously sustained momentum in the finale. Perhaps it's no bad thing for us occasionally to be reminded that at the time Schubert really was only 31.
Using a modern reproduction of an 1814 Nannette Streicher fortepiano, Tan was recorded in the Long Gallery of Doddington Hall, Lincoln, a venue too resonant for ideal clarity though agreeably mellow.'