Schubert: Sonatas and Fantasy for Violin and Fortepiano

Violinist Ilya Gringolts and fortepianist Anton Gerzenberg record Schubert’s complete music for violin and piano. It covers the three sonatas of 1816 (D 384, D 385 and D 408) and the monumental Fantasie in C major, D 934, from 1827, the year before Schubert’s death. The sonatas were published posthumously as “Sonatinen,” a label that long marked them as easy amateur fare even though Schubert called them sonatas. As Wenchun Fan’s liner notes argue, their graceful surfaces conceal real challenges of balance, phrasing and colour. D 384 shows the strongest Mozart influence, D 385 is more searching and ambiguous, and D 408 opens with a powerful unison and travels from G minor darkness to a radiant G major close.

The Fantasie was dismissed by critics after its 1828 premiere as overlong and technically extravagant. Today it is seen as one of Schubert’s most visionary chamber works. It opens in shimmering serenity, builds through a central set of variations on his song Sei mir gegrüsst, and ends in sweeping virtuosity that never loses its songfulness. The performers use period instruments: a 1718 “ex-Prové” Stradivari violin and a 2015 Paul McNulty fortepiano modeled on a c. 1819 Conrad Graf. Recorded at the Sala della Carità in Padua, the album offers a lighter and more transparent view of how Schubert’s violin music may have sounded.

Ilya Gringolts, violin
Anton Gerzenberg, fortepiano