Grandes Sonates

PI-HSIEN CHEN

Pi-hsien Chen was born in Taiwan and grew up in Germany where she still lives. Among contemporary pianists she is one of the few who are really selfless: for more than half a century she serves the good cause with full devotion, and without prejudices – Bach, the masters of the Viennese Classical School, the romantic heritage, or modern and contemporary music. She has become the latter’s prophetic pronounciator with her authoritative interpretations of the piano works by Stockhausen and Boulez, as well as Cage and beyond. But Schubert is – as the new edition of his ‘grandes sonates‘ proves – her ’heart music‘. This bold enterprise on three albums presents those sonatas (D 568, 845, 850, 894) together that demonstrate groundbreaking progressiveness and were explicitly intended as ’grandes sonates’ and published under that title. Chen underlines Schubert’s emancipation from Beethoven as well as his dialogue with the titan in a manner that is discreet and sharp at the same time and herewith leads the listener into Schubert’s innermost tonal language that transcends everything and articulates its own world of real music of the future. To reveal this process until its climax, Mrs. Chen adds two of the three ’legacy works’ that Schubert wrote a few weeks before he died: the sonatas in C minor (D 958) and in A (D 959) with their utmost dialectic tension who built the peak of the iceberg ’future’. … Chen leaves us without this most popular last sonata in B-flat (D 960) that conceals the abysses in enchanting beauty. She leaves us amidst the process, looking openly toward the unknown. In this interpretation Schubert’s mediating function between yesterday and tomorrow becomes unmistakable in its tragedy and greatness.