Schubert:
Moments Musicaux D.780
Piano Sonata in A, D.959

Mazzoli:
Isabelle Eberhardt Dreams of Pianos

‘There is hardly any feature of Schubert's music that is more contentious - and yet more fundamental - than its sense of time. Its expansiveness, the ‘heavenly length’ of his instrumental works (Schumann's famous description) have often been misunderstood by those who otherwise find his music deeply moving. Dvořák, a great admirer, lovingly wrote that Schubert simply "doesn't know when to stop". Perhaps the reason for this reaction is that in the heart of Schubert's sense of time - an inseparable part of what makes his music so profoundly expressive - lies a certain duality, a kind of a ‘Schubert Effect’. Schubert's time duality has more to do with the way his music unfolds rather than with its duration. His short pieces often seem to imply some broader dimension beyond their relative brevity - like looking at the horizon through the window of a small room - while his grandest and most ambitious ones can nevertheless be equally intimate and introspective. In a wonderful ambiguity, the beginning of a Schubert work gives no clue whether it will last five minutes or fifty’ writes Shai Wosner in his notes to his second Schubert CD for ONYX. Described by the BBC Music Magazine as being among ‘the front rank of Schubertians’ (Schubert Sonatas ONYX4073 review) this new release will be eagerly awaited by all those who appreciate this wonderful Schubert interpreter. Wosner provides an interesting twist to the programme in Missy Mazzoli’s Schubert inspired ‘Isabelle Eberhardt Dreams of Pianos’, in which the young Swiss aristocrat and adventurer of the early 20th Century imagines a Schubert sonata ‘piercing her fading consciousness like memories from her former life are fragments of Schubert's sonata. Eberhardt lived a nomadic life in North Africa, dying at 27 in a flash flood