In his illuminating booklet-essay Stephen Hough remarks that Schubert’s individualism, in extreme contrast to Beethoven’s, is ‘a withdrawal into solitude … a sense of being overpowered and overcome.’ His moving performance of the B flat Sonata, marked throughout by refined, discerning pianism and an uncommonly subtle ear for texture, bears out this perception. In all four movements, even the scherzo and finale, Hough seeks out the music’s inwardness and fragility, its ethereal, self-communing remoteness. The opening Molto moderato, unfolding in vast, calm spans, has a hypnotic inevitability; there are countless felicities of timing and colour (Hough matches Uchida in the delicacy of his pp and ppp shadings), but always a vital sense of forward motion: stasis never threatens, as it can do with Uchida. Like Uchida and Kovacevich – but unlike Brendel – Hough observes the exposition repeat; and it is typical that even the ominous fortissimo low G flat trill in the ‘first-time’ bar is relatively contained in Hough’s performance, especially by comparison with Kovacevich, whose version is surely the darkest and, in places, the most cataclysmic performance of the sonata ever recorded.
Like Uchida, Hough adopts a dangerously slow tempo in the Andante (10'32'', to Brendel’s 8'52'' and Kovacevich’s 9'27''); and, even more than her, he sustains it through the breadth and concentration of his line, the subtlety of his tonal palette (listen, for instance to his infinitely tender, infinitely poignant colouring of the turn to C sharp major near the close – 8'59'') and his pointing of rhythmic detail, as with the tolling four-note bass figure in the reprise (from 6'27''). Characteristically, the A major episode (3'20'') is quieter and more tranquil in its pathos than from the more highly strung Brendel and Kovacevich; and the ebbing close is as profoundly valedictory as in any performance I have heard. Brendel and, especially, Kovacevich bring more volatility to the scherzo (with characteristically steeper dynamic contrasts) and a more impulsive, desperate edge to the finale. But Hough’s rarefied grace and delicacy, his gentle probing of the music’s vulnerability and loneliness, are of a piece with his conception of the sonata as a whole.
As usual, Hyperion does not stint over playing time, offering another complete sonata in addition to the two-movement fragment, D613. The A minor Sonata, D784, perhaps Schubert’s most depressive instrumental work, is magnificently done. Its opening movement, taken more broadly than in the young Ashkenazy’s fiery performance, has a bleak, epic power, with fortissimos of orchestral fullness and roundness. Hough distils an immense weight of suffering from the pervasive two-note motif that dominates the movement like some massive, Wagnerian pendulum; but, typically, the lyrical music is limpidly coloured and poignantly inflected, with an unusually precise observation of Schubert’s accents. The Andante is flowing and long-arched (Ashkenazy is arguably too slow and burdened here), with some ravishing soft playing, though Hough, surprisingly, finds relatively little contrast of tone-colour for the mysterious recurrent pianissimo interjections. And if Ashkenazy is more explosive in the finale, Hough brings a superb rhythmic impulse to the eerily scudding counterpoint of the main subject and a piercing tenderness to the contrasting F major theme (0'51'').
The fragmentary C major Sonata, one of numerous Schubert torsos from the years 1817-22, is no great shakes: two pleasant but uneventful movements, both incomplete, in which Mozart rubs shoulders with Hummel. It’s unsurprising that Schubert lost interest in mid-flight. But Schubertians will be happy to have the fragment as a bonus to Hough’s individual and searching readings of the two great sonatas, which take their place alongside the most recommendable in the catalogue. Pleasure throughout was enhanced by the exemplary clarity, warmth and truthfulness of Hyperion’s recording.'