These four discs bring us the last seven, best-known piano sonatas plus the earlier A major work heralding Schubert's growth from boy to man in the genre. Whether the Dutch-Austrian Trudelies Leonhardt intends to complete the cycle with Schubert's youthful experiments and, of course, the Relique, remains to be seen. The accompanying booklet only tells us that since completing her studies in Paris with Yves Nat and Marguerite Long she has been increasingly drawn to instruments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and now confines her activities just to these. Here, she sounds on the best of terms with a warm-toned Benignus Seidner Hammerklavier built in Vienna around 1815 and restored by Otto Rindlisbacher of Zurich in 1977. She not only makes it sing, but also leaves you in no doubt of its rich dynamic range. As a Schubertian, her fingers rarely let her down. She also plays with great feeling. And there, perhaps, lies the snag: often her pursuit of expression strikes me as self-indulgent at times, even unstylishly so.
I started with the last two sonatas, in A major and B flat, to get her into focus, as it were, in close comparison with the volatile Melvyn Tan (EMI). With her deeper-toned instrument (tuned to the old concert pitch of A=415) as well as her determination to allow ample time for every phrase to tell, I thought her first two movements in the B flat work more searching and laden than Tan's—especially the searing slow movement, which he takes far too quickly. I particularly liked the rich, assuaging warmth she brings to its middle section in the major key. It was only in the Scherzo and finale that I began to question her deliberation—not least in choice of tempo. In the A major Sonata, however, my eyebrows were far more frequently raised. Right from the start she seems determined to make every note her own, as the saying goes, by means of an elasticity of pulse that reminded me of a certain well-known writer's warning about sweet music ''when time is broke and no proportion kept''. Tan's occasional impulsiveness pales into insignificance in comparison. And even if his Andante is again too fast, Leonhardt's is too slow—and still more so, her Scherzo.
My confidence in her indisputable, underlying musicianship was for the most part restored in the C minor work, the first of Schubert's great farewell trilogy of 1828. Rhythm is held on a taut enough rein in the opening Allegro. The well sustained Adagio brings rich contrasts of sonority, albeit with a few operational 'noises off' in the context of the soft pedal, and the third movement, significantly headed Menuetto rather than scherzo, is judiciously timed. In the danse macabre-like finale, however, her relaxation of tempo at one episodic point made me wonder if I had been momentarily transported with Mendelssohn to a gondola in Venice. The movement as a whole sounds disproportionately protracted.
Next, going backwards, we encounter the G major Sonata of 1826, once omitted from standard editions because originally published under the title of Fantasie, Andante, Menuetto und Allegretto. Predictably, Leonhardt is very much in her element in the opening Molto moderato e cantabile, and who would quarrel with her leisurely tempo rubato here when so full of wonderment. Few of us would ever have guessed that the following Andante was meant as the work's real slow movement. I only wish the finale could have brought more consistently sustained animation by way of contrast. Animation is again the missing element in the D major work of the previous year. She chooses a dangerously slow tempo for the last three movements, and in the opening Allegro vivace, as well as the finale, she all too keenly reminds us of her addiction to even greater leisure at the slightest lyrical provocation. There is far more to enjoy in the two A minor Sonatas of 1825 and 1823 respectively, even if the Andante con moto (with its many repeats) of the later work does slightly outstay its welcome because taken so slowly. Apart from a few moments of free-wheeling in its finale the earlier A minor Sonata shows Leonhardt at her musicianly best. The youthful A major work (usually attributed to 1819) in its turn is always allowed its rightful time to sing.
In sum, I felt that Leonhardt was trying just a bit too hard to make the music 'speak'—with results that, after repeated hearings, might all too easily sound idiosyncratic. But that said, I'm sure Schubert himself would have preferred her warmly feminine romantic human heart to a 'mere mechanicus'. The recording itself is true enough to life.'