I doubt whether this is going to join my three or four preferred recordings of all time of these pieces – I’m still pondering some reservations – but in this anniversary year we’re unlikely to be given a version of the Impromptus more ingratiating and lyrically lovely. It has mettle as well; Uchida is too intelligent an artist to risk allowing the directional force of Schubert to run down, even when he’s in a wandering mood; and she knows that he’s much more than a lyricist. The first numbers of each of these sets of four pieces – the most extended and elaborate as compositions – are carried through with great sureness for their dramatic quality as narratives. You notice in particular how well considered her interpretations are when she allows a passage to move on, sometimes quite freely, where less interesting players would have lingered or remained strictly in tempo.
There’s something about the recording, however, which doesn’t ring completely true. To be a little cruel, if you took against it you might describe it as designer-Schubert, a projection of ravishingly beautiful playing on a beautiful piano in sensuously beautiful sound – a product with a mission to melt the hardest heart. Well, dip into the loveliness at the beginning of the G flat major Impromptu (track 3). You cannot deny that the quality there is absolutely in place. But elsewhere I’m not so sure. The sonorities tend to spread, as if they’ve been artificially enhanced (for example, at the end of track 2, in the final chord). When I called this an ingratiating version of the Impromptus I meant that as a compliment, but the effect it sometimes has is of wanting to be liked a little too much. It comes at you with knobs on.
Recording and playing are of a piece. With Uchida, I never feel that it is anyone other than Schubert speaking, but for long stretches she does make him ever so wistful. His messages reach us as if from a long way off; my preference, more of the time, is for Schubert presented as a man of flesh and blood. And, in general, for more simplicity of manner. She is a player who is forever doing something, and once in a while she alights on a detail (a staccato dot on a bass note, for example) and seems to me to make too much of it. Dynamics too. The upbeat B flat at the start of the second Impromptu (track 2) is too soft (and second time round, barely audible); and surely it’s enough for a forte contrast to be strong, in the context of what has gone before, rather than unnerving (second Impromptu of the second set, track 6).
But my reaction to moments of self-consciousness, as I see them, mustn’t obscure my main impression of much delightful listening. Uchida is a Schubertian of class, and the last pieces of each set (tracks 4 and 8) show her at her best. In the one, the Allegretto tempo is spot on, and what a difference that makes; in the other, a scherzando number, she meets its calls for character and virtuosity with tremendous zest – and the flight from top to bottom of the instrument with which she rounds it off one will not hear bettered.'