Following the highly successful releases of works by Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Schumann, the Japanese-born pianist Hideyo Harada now presents her fourth SACD for Audite.

Two main works from Schubert’s piano music, two solutions for the great form, two approaches in composing musical time. From the outside, they appear as contrary poles in Schubert’s pianistic oeuvre: energetic, resolute and sometimes boastful in the case of the Wanderer Fantasy, whereas the final piano sonata is restrained, elusive and at times faltering.

That, at least, is the impression given by the outer movements. The common elements are in the slow movements. No other Romantic addressed so radically what is brought into focus here: the notion of time. In the Wanderer Fantasy it is reflected as rhythm, as “measured time”: Schubert developed the piece from a central rhythm. The sonata questions the course of time itself, the elementary medium of life in music, by breaking off and starting afresh, roaming and stretching, with an agility which mistrusts itself. The great question marks are in the central, slow pieces. They lead to a central motif in Schubert’s thinking and feelings: the wanderer to whose symbolic character he dedicated an early song.

In her interpretation, Hideyo Harada elucidates the contrasts as well as the common undercurrent which forms a link between the works.