As with her previous Schubert releases, Mitsuko Uchida once again proves herself a consummate craftsperson who masters Schubert’s ambling, unpressured domain with the utmost determination and specificity. Yet I find her slight rhythmic distensions and microscopically calibrated diminuendos in both the Schubert E-flat sonata’s first two movements and in the Moments Musicaux self-conscious, arch, and even mincing. The middle section in the latter’s C-sharp minor piece (No. 4) swoons with self-regard, while No. 3 is similarly overphrased and contrived (the grace notes, for starters).
Uchida begins No. 5 promisingly, with monumental steadiness, but impedes the continuity with superfluous breath pauses. While No. 6’s deliberation certainly feels slower-paced than Schubert’s proscribed Allegretto, Uchida’s flexible lyricism moves the music more convincingly than Richter’s grand and rather static longeurs. The E-flat sonata’s Menuetto boasts ravishingly shaded soft playing, worked out to the nines, and the first movement’s rotary 16th notes are more suavely and evenly dispatched than those of Jeno Jando and Alain Planes among recent contenders. When you listen to Uchida’s Schubert, you sense that for her no boundaries exist between ideation and execution. However, I prefer the simplicity, organic flow, and expressive economy Wilhelm Kempff brings to this sonata, and Clifford Curzon to the Moments Musicaux.
