"...profoundly poetic...as drawn to lyric intimacy as he is to dazzling firebrand virtuosity." â Eric Friesen (Broadcaster)

11 MP3 Songs in this album (66:50) !
Related styles: Classical: Piano solo, Classical: Romantic Era, Featuring Piano

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Georgy Tchaidze in conversation with Eric Friesen

Franz Schubert is, in many ways, the most underrated of the great composers. Music of the most astonishing variety and originality poured out of him almost every day of the very few he had on this earth, and yet he is rarely given his rightful place in anyoneâs top ten list of great composers. Georgy Tchaidze is one musician who does. âSchubertâs music had a very strong influence on me when I was in my teens and for some time now his creativity occupies one of the central positions of my mind,â Georgy told me recently when I asked him why his first solo recital CD was made up entirely of Schubertâs music. This may seem an unusual program for a young Russian pianist, but there is a profoundly poetic side to this young man, as drawn to lyric intimacy as he is to dazzling firebrand virtuosity, a true Honens âComplete Artistâ.

In fact, we might call Franz Schubert the âComplete Composerâ. As Georgy reminded me in our conversation about this project: âIâve never understood how anybody could interpret Schubertâs music as something monolithic, something devoid of essential dramatic contrasts. Even a very brief look through the scores tells us something completely other. Itâs so full of life, full of contrasts, it contains so many dramatic details like exceptional crescendi from ppp to fff, so many abnormal accents and extreme dynamics. Thatâs what makes his tender, gentle, poetical melodies even more fragile and touching when itâs heard in its savage surroundings.â

The CD opens with the lyrical, sunny side of Schubert, the Sonata in A major D. 664. He wrote it in his early 20s, vacationing with friends in the mountains of Upper Austria, the very same memorable summer he also produced his congenial âTroutâ Quintet. As a listener, one eases into this youthful sonata like slipping into an old, comfortable sweater. It is Schubert at his most relaxed, most songful, most charming self. The second movement is a dreamy, beautiful nocturne, with a hypnotic rhythmic pattern of a long note followed by four short ones, repeated over and over again. The final movement trips into a delightful waltz, a breathtakingly carefree example of early 19th century Viennese âno worriesâ.

The Drei Klavierstücke D. 946 are three piano pieces written about six months before Schubert died at the far too early age of 31. They are rarely programmed, what with all those wonderful impromptus and âmoments musicauxâ Schubert was also turning out â just amazing given the late stage of his terminal syphilis. But Georgy Tchaidze believes these late pieces have the special depth of Schubertâs late sonatas, and wanted them included. And they have nothing of the dying swan in them. No. 1 in E-flat minor has all the dramatic urgency of the composerâs song Der Erlkönig, with a meditative section in the middle. No. 2 in E-flat major is what you might call a Schubert long-song, over ten minutes with all the repeats, another example of Schubertâs âheavenly lengthâ. It opens with a beautiful, leisurely walking melody, alternating with a more turbulent middle section. No. 3 in C major is a playful song without words, a short burst of joy with a mesmerizing middle section of what sounds like syncopated wind chimes.

The âWandererâ Fantasy in C major D. 760 makes huge demands on the player. Schubert himself found it beyond his own skill at the piano, saying âthe devil may play it.â The heart of this four movement work is the Adagio second movement, with its theme taken from Schubertâs famous song Der Wanderer, and then spun out in a series of variations. Georgy said to me: âI feel this Fantasy expresses some of the most important themes of Schubertâs music: themes of wandering, suffering, loneliness and the pursuit of happiness at the same time, like in the late song cycle Die Winterreise.â And then Georgy quoted me some lines from the early 20th century Russian poet, Osip Mandelstamâs collection Tristia, poems of exile and journeying:

That evening the forest of organ pipes did not play.
A native cradle sang Schubert for us,
The mill was grinding, the musicâs blue-eyed drunkenness
Laughed in the songs of the hurricane.
The brown-green world of the old song,
But only eternally young where the Erl-king
Shakes the rumbling crowns of nightingaled
Linden trees in savage rage.

Another young artist channeling the torrential dark side of Schubert.

And finally, as a kind of encore to this excellent program, Georgy plays the brooding, introspective fragment, Allegretto in C minor D. 915. It was written in the year before Schubert died, for the autograph book of a friend who was leaving on a long trip. It really has the feeling of Schubert also saying goodbye to this world, and to us. Itâs a gentle, heartbreakingly beautiful farewell, from a composer who had so much to give and so little time and
place in which to give it. The wanderer, almost at rest.

© 2011 Eric Friesen
Eric Friesen is a veteran broadcaster, writer and speaker on music and culture. He spent much of his life as a network classical music host and producer for CBC Radio and Minnesota Public Radio (MPR). He serves and has served on a number boards and advisory groups in the arts, including the Board of the Honens International Piano Competition.