Schubert: 3 Klavierstücke, (Sokolov, Avdeeva)

If you’re at all like me, you might at some point have had the impression that Schubert was an efficient generator of nice melodies and not a lot else. The Piano Pieces, written just months before Schubert’s death in 1828, are an uncannily good demonstration of how false that impression is – for while Schubert could certainly write a gorgeous melody, there is something cipherlike and subterranean about much of the music here, even when it seems to be at its most good-natured. In No.1, for instance, the agitation established in the A section never quite goes away, even when the music shifts into the major (0:44), by virtue of the boiling textures in the LH and the urgent dotted rhythms in the RH. Even in the B major trio there is something uneasy – for a start, the opening figure of the trio and the A section is virtually identical, and the trills & tremolos in the trio retain a nervous quality. The second trio in Ab also opens with the same dotted upbeat that opens the A and B sections, and despite