This is the sixth recording of Mitsuko Uchida's cycle of Schubert piano sonatas - and these performances certainly have an air of occasion about them. In both sonatas, Uchida's tempos tend to be slow, her colours dark, her pacing sombre and meditative. The Schubert scholar John Reed has noted that the little opening motif of the D845 Sonata bears a resemblance to Schubert's song Totengrabers Heimweh, and Uchida seems to be staring into the grave itself. Her bare octaves move where angels fear to tread, with stark, staring chords in the sharpest of contrasts. Taking three minutes longer than Brendel in the opening movement, Uchida digs where he drums; rhythms beat on the brain, menacing rather than confident in their energy.
Compared with both Brendel's lucid lyricism, and the lambent, old-world gentility of Schiff's slow movement, Uchida's is more withdrawn, more self-conscious in its opening anacrusis and in its hesitant rubato. And her third-movement Trio is so drawn-back that one barely feels the relationship of pulse to that of the Scherzo.
For the earlier D575 Sonata, Uchida opens again with short, sharp, heel-clicking chords, this time answering bleak single notes. The remoteness of Schubert's harmonic keys really bites here: Uchida is fierce where Schiff is firm. And again, tempos reveal broad, long-pondered phrasing: Uchida's Andante, hauntingly private in its steady simplicity of movement, is racked by Schubert's violent major/minor contrasts.
The third movement, a full minute longer than Schiff's, almost loses any sense of being a Scherzo at all: it is more of a gently somnolent intermezzo, its shy little oscillating three-note figure rocking into a Landler which resonates in the consciousness even when the sonata itself is over.
Hilary Finch
... another view
Mitsuko Uchida can be a wonderful Schubertian, and I rate her recording of the B flat Sonata one of the finest ever (8/98). The present disc, however, leaves me far from satisfied. In fact, if someone had played me just the opening bars of each sonata I'm sure I would not have wanted to hear the rest. Uchida dwells portentously on the dotted notes, and does so virtually every time they appear, effectively destroying whatever dramatic effect she may have had in mind. At best this conveys a determination to control the music rather than let it flow, and in the B major Sonata it also effaces the crucial contrast Schubert asks for in the development section (from 4'35'') where he double-dots the motif and sends it on fantastical harmonic journeys.
Still, had I not got beyond the opening movements it would have been my loss, because Uchida's pianism is undeniably first-rate and her interpretations demand to be taken seriously. Her clarity, will-power and wide range of colour largely won me over in the later stages of each sonata. She brings out the barely suppressed agitation in the Scherzo of the A minor and contrasts it with an exquisitely pained nostalgia in the Trio section, before bringing an appropriate nerviness to the perpetual motion finale. In the B major Sonata the Landler feel of the third movement is all the more effective for Uchida's emphasis on soulfulness rather than lilt, and I like the tension she finds between the finale's amiable surface and its underlying gravity.
Overall, what bothers me most, I think, is her consistent exaggeration of contrasts, which for my money turns much of the music into inferior Beethoven rather than great Schubert. The piano sound itself is bright and the acoustic a little over-resonant, giving too much the impression of an empty hall and making the sudden hushes Schubert so often requests impossible to achieve.'