Collectors who missed these 1967/69 recordings in earlier CD incarnations will be pleased to have a second chance at them–and for a proverbial song. Lili Kraus’ large-scale, virile Schubert playing sweeps away any mental image anyone might have of the composer as a cherub-faced kewpie doll. She strips the Impromptus clean of drawing-room varnish and renders them with passionate vigor and welcome astringency. Each set’s epic first pieces, plus D. 935’s great B-flat Theme and Variations, unfold in taut, forward moving lines punctuated by subtle tempo modifications. Like her mentor Artur Schnabel, Kraus rightly feels the G-flat Impromptu two beats to the measure rather than four, although the Urtext F-natural she favors in the left hand at measure 11 makes less musical sense than the conventional F-flat most everyone else plays. I admire her rollicking abandon and forceful accents in D. 935’s concluding F minor piece, but these qualities seem too brusque and overbearing for comfort in the E-flat D. 899 No. 2.
In a field crowded with excellent recordings of the A minor D. 845 sonata, Kraus still remains a top contender. She intones the outer movements in large paragraphic arcs that pay full heed to the music’s extraordinary harmonic surprises, while the Scherzo’s dotted rhythms pounce when least expected. I especially love how Kraus organically links the second-movement variations to flow in and out of each other, oblivious to barlines, in a manner markedly different from the literalism favored by Richter or Uchida. I do miss the former’s dulcet elegance in the “little” A major sonata, where Kraus’ heated angularity strikes me as too intense and even overbearing for such lyrical music. Not every selection will correspond to all tastes, yet it’s hard to be indifferent to a pianist of Kraus’ intelligence and musicianship. I look forward to Vanguard Classics reissuing her commanding recordings of the Schubert Wanderer Fantasy and posthumous B-flat Sonata.
