Reviews

For his second short festival at Easter, Francis Humphrys, director of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, presented three recitals, in which Finghin Collins, John O'Conor and Hugh Tinney each played one of Schubert's last nine completed piano sonatas.

Shcubert Piano Sonatas

Bantry House, Co Cork

Humphrys insisted on the inclusion of all repeats in the sonatas, resurrecting the old argument about listeners needing to be familiarised with the music's themes, and pointing to the linking material that simply doesn't get played when exposition repeats are left out. It's a debatable issue, and Alfred Brendel, for one, is on the other side, arguing that such repeats are in some cases "not only superfluous, but positively damaging".

Some of the Bantry performances raised sympathy for Brendel's point of view. Schubert's sonatas are not at all as clear-cut in argument or structure as Beethoven's. The physical layout for the hands often tells little about the shape of the music, unlike the Lisztian virtuosity of the later 19th century on which so many pianists love to feed. In Schubert, something that seems decorative, even accompanimental, may actually be the main matter in hand, and not a bit of padding, or a marking of time to fulfil a pre-ordained pattern. Some of Schubert's most unexpected gestures need to survive without the support of conventional musical logic. They are, as it were, surprising twists in a narrative into which they can be absorbed if never quite precisely explained, other than by the rightness with which they sound.

On Sunday, the first evening's sonatas found both Hugh Tinney (in the stormy A minor Sonata, D784) and Finghin Collins (in the altogether gentler G major Sonata, D894) struggling with some of these problems. There were moments when sections of the music simply didn't join together properly, even whole movements which seemed to end unsatisfactorily or at the wrong moment. Collins played with a more appropriately warm sound than Tinney, whose tone seemed thin and sometimes over-projected.

John O'Conor (in the C minor Sonata, D958) showed an altogether superior musical mastery of the material, with, alas, one major reservation. Too often he quite simply wasn't master of the notes, and there were periodic, unnerving muddles as if his concentration had momentarily deserted him.

If one had to try to characterise the approaches, Tinney sounded the most thoughtful, Collins the most simple and direct in his responses, and O'Conor the most experienced, revealing the richest palette of chord voicing and nuance, and the soundest grasp of large-scale Schubertian spans.

Collins drew what was probably the shortest straw, by having to play the earliest of the chosen sonatas, in B, D575, which he didn't manage to make a convincing case for. On the other hand, his closing performance of the last sonata, in B flat, D960, presented what was probably the most sheerly beautiful playing of the three days. He hasn't yet quite got the measure of the first two movements (the slow movement in particular has depths that he doesn't even suggest), but his intricate and affectionate shaping of the Scherzo was utterly captivating.

O'Conor stayed both on and off course in his subsequent offerings, saving his best for the end, in his performance of the delectable Sonata in A, D664. Tinney went from strength to strength, like a speaker warming to his subject and finding his range in terms of expressive potency. The stiffness of his opening performance, interpretable as intellectual rigour (though far too unyielding for Schubert), loosened. The change was slight but still significant in the great Sonata in A, D959, but the effects were altogether more keenly felt in the Sonata in A minor, D845.

Here, what had earlier been tight in his approach now became elastically sprung, the compass of phrasing became wider, with a sense of overall integration that reminded one what a fine Schubertian he is when on the best of form. "Schubert's greatest sonatas performed by Ireland's greatest pianists" was the billing for the three days, something I'm sure a number of other Irish pianists might have a view on, not least Barry Douglas, who certainly knows how to present Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy as a harbinger of major developments in 19th-century pianistic virtuosity.

Leaving aside such an absurdly exclusionist slogan, in the end, it was the paradoxical achievement of this series not only to remind listeners of what extraordinary sonatas Schubert wrote, but also of how problematic they can be in performance. Many of the sonatas are long, and include movements that can easily seem to outstay their welcome - with all repeats religiously observed, three sonatas a night made for very long programmes indeed. As a demonstration of the attractions, perils, and ultimate rewards to be had, these Bantry performances traversed the gamut. - Michael Dervan.