Stephen Pritchard 

Brahms, Schubert, Ravel, William Bolcom: Piano Music for Four Hands CD review – an exceptional reading

Husband and wife Leon Fleisher and Katherine Jacobson amaze with with logic and lyricism
  
  

Leon Fleisher and Katherine Jacobson
Four hands make light work: husband and wife Leon Fleisher and Katherine Jacobson. Photograph: Jennifer Bishop

Can there be a more perfect work for four hands than Schubert’s Fantasia in F Minor? The beauty, logic and lyricism of its four interconnecting movements never fail to move and amaze, particularly when played by pianists of the stature of Leon Fleisher and his wife, Katherine Jacobson. Their reading is quite the equal of Radu Lupu and Murray Perahia’s celebrated 1985 recording and completely overshadows the other, more florid works on the disc: Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes, Op 52A, Ravel’s La Valse and Graceful Ghost Rag by the Pulitzer prize-winning US composer William Bolcom.

 

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