Yesterday, my Schubert CD had its U.S. release, and not entirely coincidentally, I began a run of performances of the A Major Sonata, this one in a house concert in London. Schubert, once again, is looming large.

Not that he had stopped doing so, really. But it was wonderful to be reminded yesterday that you can be overwhelmed by what you think you know. There are certain pieces which give the impression, at their outset, of  embarking on a journey. The Schubert A Major is one of them, and the listener (and player, who is hopefully also listening) is richly rewarded for making the trip, for it takes off in unexpected — shocking, really – directions, and leaves us, in the profoundest sense, somewhere other than where we began.

Schubert died at the age of 31, a mere two years older than I currently am. (!) As I’ve said, I neither know what “maturity” means, nor think I possess it,  but the astonishing development that took place in this young man’s final years has brought the subject to mind again. (Just to be clear, I’m not for a moment suggesting that maturity might be all that separates me from Schubert: there is the small matter of his genius.) Many have said that Schubert’s premature death is the greatest loss to have befallen music; I’m unsure. Were the feverish intensity and celestial lyricism that characterize Schubert’s final year a step along a path towards an unfathomed musical language? Or were those qualities available to him only because he knew the end was near, and because he was quickly drowning in his own unhappiness?

We’ll never know, of course. What I do believe firmly is that what distinguishes late Schubert from any other music is not the feelings themselves — many have suffered greatly, after all. Nor is it is compositional ability — great as it was, it did not exceed that of Mozart or Beethoven. What I believe is without precedent and remains unequaled is Schubert’s access to his inner life — his subconscious, even. Even the twentieth century failed to produce a howl as primal as the one that disrupts the songfulness of the A Major Sonata’s second movement. Is this, perhaps, maturity — an awareness of what lies beneath so absolute that it can be put on paper? (Again, genius surely helps.) Or perhaps the meaning of maturity can be found in the open-heartedness of the last movement — music of pure generosity. After Schubert’s very soul is crushed in the slow movement, where exactly does this come from?

I am perpetually wary of drawing connections between a composer’s life and work. (Exhibit A: Heiligenstadt Testament — Beethoven’s Second Symphony.) But I cannot hear the A Major Sonata (or Schwanengesang, or the String Quintet, or the C Major Symphony, or or or…) without being made aware of how much pain Schubert must have endured. Someone once said to me that Schubert’s music is sad when it is in minor keys, and tragic when it is in major keys, and it’s true — even the music that is consoling contains a knowledge of something terrible.

I am unwilling to say that I am grateful to Schubert for enduring whatever it was that made these masterworks possible. But for their existence I am deeply grateful. This is not merely music you listen to; it resides inside you, speaks to you, evolves with you. Please: stop reading, and go listen to Schubert.

On the Wigmore Hall’s current podcast, I talk a bit about the first movement of the C Major Sonata and the second movement of the A Major Sonata, and play some illustrative examples. (My first experiment with such multi-tasking!)

For now, you can listen via the Wigmore’s site, but I’ll post the clips here soon as well.

[Cough.]

It’s been a while, and the blog, an alert reader points out, has gathered moss.  (This particular moss was never visible to me on my computer, so I can only hope it has been successfully eradicated.) Writing on the blog has always been something I’ve enjoyed, but over the last few months — during which time I’ve been particularly unmossy, or unmoored, myself — at moments when I’ve been inclined to post, the question has tended to be “should I write on the blog or practice another hour?” or “should I write on the blog or sleep another hour?” and, well, in my life practice and sleep tend to win most of their battles. (When they face off, things get interesting.)

But now, I’m sitting on a plane from Tokyo to New York, and I’m at that point in the transpacific flight at which I’ve eaten, slept more-or-less a full night (day? who can tell…), read a Russian novel,  mentally reorganized my closets, eaten again, learned ancient Greek and read the Iliad, and it seems like an excellent time to get back to blogging. In the unlikely event that this flight eventually lands, I will even post what I write.

It’s been an eventful few months. In addition to the concerts, which kept me occupied (and then some), I made a recording, live at the Wigmore Hall, of Schubert sonatas, paired with some Kurtag. I’ll be writing plenty on that subject soon enough, as it was a pretty remarkable experience, which again reshaped my feelings about recording. (Not to mention Schubert…) But for now, while I gather my thoughts, I offer you a list of recent events which could have been, should have been, and in certain cases, still might be blog fodder:

• Playing the Schumann Concerto, without a conductor, in Saint Paul, and subsequently rethinking the relationship of a soloist with an orchestra
• The man with a snake on the A Train in New York/woman with a rabbit on the Hibiya Line in Tokyo. (I was thinking some sort of modern day Aesop fable/cultural diversity combo deal.)
• The experience of walking into the dressing room of the Sociedad Filarmonica in Bilbao and being surrounded by signed photos of Casals, Rubinstein, Schnabel, Menuhin, Cortot,  Szigeti — and my mother and grandmother.
• My intrepid Japanese manager’s successful effort to rebook us — on a different airline! — onto a flight from Osaka to Matsuyama which was leaving precisely 29 minutes after our arrival at the airport. And luggage was involved!
• The ordering process at a Japanese-operated Korean restaurant visited by me and two friends — one Korean, and one a limited speaker of Japanese. My contribution to the process was to veto selections once they had been made, which usually took 10 minutes and involved a combination of two languages and some frantic hand gesturing.
• The always enlightening (sometimes in surprising ways) experience of taking a month away from performing after going at a whirlwind pace for half a year — a bit, I suspect, like quitting smoking cold turkey, though I hope and suspect that the performing is slightly less hazardous to my health.

In short, it’s been intense/exhilarating/insane. This state of affairs looks set to continue for the foreseeable future: expect more frequent reporting from the trenches.