This compilation from Brendel’s Schubert recordings of the mid 1970s contains early, thoughtful performances of the Impromptus, newly digitalized in tracks which are clear and true over a broad range of dynamics and timbre; and the bonus of a beguilingly ambivalent C minor Allegretto, 11 tiny, playful Ecossaises, and the Hungarian Melody in B minor.
The obvious, and necessary, comparison is with Philips’s 1988 recording of the Impromptus alone. On the whole, the later performances are marginally more clearly defined, inner voices worked harder, momentum more urgent. For the D935 group, the 1988 disc certainly scores, with its sharper dynamic contrasts and bolder delineation of structure. The ‘Rosamunde’ theme of the B flat Impromptu, for instance, tends to be over-sturdy and rather charmless in this earlier performance, lacking the clearer contours and variety of weight and measure of the later recording.
But for the D899 group, I find these earlier recordings, with their slightly warmer, gentler acoustic, irresistible. The first Impromptu, in C minor, starts at a hushed distance, with an easy, expansive development into the major, which captures exactly Schubert’s ‘wandering’ mode. The third Impromptu, on the other hand, is a case of “Auf dem Wasser zu singen”: a warm cantabile purls out over minutely balanced accompanimental figuration. In the A flat Impromptu Brendel is not yet too driven: where in 1988 he can scarcely pause for breath, this earlier performance both ebbs and flows, its waves of figuration breaking gently against every bar line, every cadence.
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