Stephen Pritchard 

Schubert: Impromptus, Ländler D366 – review

Schubert's homesick blues are beautifully captured by the pianist Cordelia Williams, writes Stephen Pritchard
  
  


Don't be lulled by Cordelia Williams's sweetly cool reading of the first two of Schubert's Impromptus D899 in this recording; there's romantic fire lurking under the surface. No 3 is almost Brahmsian in its achingly beautiful sweep, and there's a delicious, dark brooding beneath the delicacy of No 1, D935. Crucially, the 24-year-old former BBC Young Musician of the Year manages to suffuse each of these eight miniatures with just the right degree of regret; a characteristic she exploits again in the minor key examples amid the 17 tiny Ländler, which perhaps reflect Schubert's homesickness for Vienna when spending the summer of 1824 in Hungary.

 

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