Here is Schubert playing as compulsive and single-minded as any on record. Formidably serious and concentrated this is not for lovers of ‘lilac time’ or of softly focused, lyrical options. Indeed, it is often as if the Grim Reaper himself had cut a swathe through Schubert, forbidding at a glance even a touch of solace, let alone Gemutlichkeit. Yet the force and authenticity of such an outwardly controversial view is made unarguable and few pianists have penetrated more deeply to the dark, restlessly beating heart beneath Schubert’s outwardly genial surface.
The ferocity of Kovacevich’s fortissimo chording in the development section of the sonata’s first movement is wholly typical of his refusal of all polite circumspection, and rarely can the Andantino, with its central elemental uproar, have sounded more spare or disconsolate. Even the Scherzo becomes both a memory of Beethoven’s fierce whimsy and a presage of Chopin’s irony, and more than touch of unease erases much chance of a conventionally meandering or leisurely view of the finale. For Kovacevich, then, this is surely Schubert’s sonata equivalent of Winterreise; a savage journey into oblivion.
Many will look for light relief in the Moments musicaux, but once again Kovacevich refuses all obvious sentiment or enticement. His tone remains lean and acidulous, and he possesses a rare ability to drain his sonority of all colour substance, accentuating the hectic flush of No. 5 and achieving an extreme sense of desolation in No. 6.
This record, then, is for those who concede that Schubert could be “full of sorrow/And leaden eyed despair”, a composer who had more than his share of life’s vicissitudes. Competition from other great Schubertians (Schnabel, Brendel, Pollini, Lupu and Imogen Cooper, to name but five!) is intense, yet Kovacevich’s Schubert surely inhabits a world of its own and is in a sense beyond compare; an extraordinary achievement. The recordings are spectacularly bold and the full force of a modern Steinway comes at you in an often volcanic blaze of sound.'