Size isn't everything…

Franz Schubert had great friends and he needed them. His father wanted him to teach school but Franz was built to compose music and what started as a family hobby turned into an all consuming passion. Giving up his teaching job, Schubert turned to his friends and with their help he was allowed, slowly and painfully, to become the artist he knew himself to be.

On the Piano this Sunday more of Schubert's powerful, short piano works, dubbed Impromptus by his publisher. These pieces communicated Schubert's personality as well as any of his nearly one-thousand compositions. This week we pick up with number 6 of the eight composed in 1827. Schubert had his joy of being published tempered with the knowledge that the printer wanted short easy works for the student that would sell. Some, Robert Schumann and music critic Alfred Eisenstein see the second set of "impromptus" as a disguised piano sonata. Whether it is or not, we hear the last three works of the second set and three Klavierstucke or piano pieces composed in Schubert's last year of life that stretch his piano technique to its most demanding. Again, I look for the most persuasive of the recordings available to me and you can hear them on the Piano, this Sunday afternoon at 5 on KPAC & KTXI.

host, Randy Anderson

Impromptu

Do you know Dr. Nan? You might have seen her play around town, or heard her on The Piano, or caught her video. Tomorrow you can hear Nicole Narboni on WFMT at 4pm (central) here.

Deathless Art

Schubert was much more experienced than his 31 years would suggest. Classical composers are sophisticated, that goes without saying, but how advanced were the greats at 28 years of age? Schubert was gifted as a child and writing with charm and his unique voice at age twelve, at the end of his short life he was a giant.

Yes he was striving to be an opera composer and with Rossini and Mozart's operas there wasn't room for more, but Schubert is a great composer that had limited access to orchestras. In the last year of life, which Benjamin Britten described "miraculous", Schubert's compositions are sublime. His interplay between light and dark, major and minor are more than techniques but a subtext to our inner selves.

On the piano this Sunday the last of Franz Schubert's Impromptus. In the hands of a great interpreter, these works are transcendental art. When you have a pianist of the caliber of Edwin Fischer you have music of the highest order.

The Piano, this Sunday afternoon at 5 here on KPAC and KTXI.

host Randy Anderson