{TABLE} Sonata in E minor D566 .............. Schubert Sonata in C D840. ................... Schubert Sonata in A minor ................... Schubert {/TABLE} SCHUBERT'S Piano Sonata in E minor dates from 1817 when the composer was 20. Its two movements demonstrate the composer's facility in producing an apparently endless flow of melody with hypnotically lulling accompanimental figures, in this case interrupted by chords which reawake the attention, but the landscape on the whole is featureless. Andras Schiff played it as winningly as possible, but it remains of mostly historical interest.
Last night's recital in the Irish Times/National Concert Hall Celebrity Series took on a brighter aspect with the first movement of the unfinished Sonata in C, written in 1825 when Schubert was 28. Schiff lavished such unobtrusive subtlety on its windings and repetitions that for all its 17 minutes it never seemed too long, and one could glimpse the spirit that was to come to fruition in the better known late sonatas. The second of the two extant movements was a bit like the Sonata in E minor, an anti climax of endlessly receding horizons.
The Sonata in A minor, D845, also written in 1825, is complete and employs a much wider gamut of expression from wistfulness to almost military sonorities.
It looks forward to Liszt and backward to Beethoven and the spirit of Bach hovers momentarily over the second movement. Schubert is in the process of discovering himself as a composer of sonatas and of marking out the boundaries of his territories.
Schiff's control of rhythm and dynamics was greatly to admired as he never exaggerated an effect but made his points by a delicate variation of nuance; nevertheless, I wondered if perhaps this particular work might not have been better served by a freer approach. Schiff was at his finest in the more reflective moments, but he seemed reluctant to go as far as he might in the moments of romantic bravura.