Schubert Piano Sonata No. 19 in C minor, D958. Moments musicaux, D780. Radu Lupu (pf).

Decca digital (Full price) (LP) SXDL7554.

This is very beautiful Schubert playing, as musically sensitive as it is tonally mellow throughout a wide dynamic range. The composer Lupu presents is nevertheless a more benign Schubert than Brendel's. Or to put it another way, Brendel projects the music more strongly, as if to an audience. With Lupu it's more like overhearing him playing for his own satisfaction, in his own room.

Schubert never came closer to Beethoven than in the C minor Sonata's opening movement. With his slightly slower tempo, Lupu her is less arrestingly dramatic than Brendel (Philips 6747 175, 10/75—part of an 8-LP box set). But it is a reading of breadth all the same, without Brendel's slightly disturbing tempo changes resulting from his slowing down for the second subject. Both artists take the Adagio very slowly indeed. Brendel, I think, sustains it with just a little more intensity—and perhaps with a wider range of tone colour, though Lupu is a profoundly persuasive seer. In the third movement Lupu is nearer Schubert's allegro marking, though it might be argued that Brendel's slower tempo emphasizes that the title is Menuetto, not Scherzo. Both play the finale at much the same speed, but I think Brendel somehow makes it a little more demonic—and other-worldly, too, in that unexpected central episode in B major. In the Moments musicaux, Brendel's considerably livelier tempo for Nos. 3 and 5 perhaps makes for greater variety in the set as a whole. If Brendel is marginally more potent in expression. Lupu in his turn offers the eloquence of simplicity. The recording is generous in playing time as well as wonderfully true in quality of tone.

JC