“It sometimes seems to me as if I did not belong to this world at all.” These alleged words of Schubert kept coming to mind as I listened to Mitsuko Uchida’s absorbed, deeply poetic reading of the B flat Sonata. At 21'53'' (including exposition repeat) and 10'40'' respectively, both movements are at once more leisurely and more pliant than from any of the rival pianists listed above; here and there, especially in the long-drawn-out closing theme of the first-movement exposition (from 4'17'') and the lingering upbeats of the Andante’s melody, pliancy may come dangerously close to stasis. But Uchida’s concentration and inwardness are of a rare order. No pianist makes you so aware how much of the first two movements is marked pp or even ppp; and none conjures such subtlety of colour in the softest dynamics: listen, for instance, to her playing of the three unearthly C sharp minor chords that usher in the first-movement development (10'55''), or her timing and colouring of the breathtaking sideslip from C sharp minor to C major in the Andante (7'24''). Other pianists, especially Kovacevich, may find a stronger undercurrent of foreboding or desperation in these two movements – though Uchida builds the development of the initial Molto moderato superbly to its dramatic climax. But none probes more hauntingly the music’s mysterious contemplative ecstasy or creates such a sense of inspired improvisation. And her limpid cantabile sonorities are always ravishing on the ear.
Uchida is equally attuned to the less rarefied world of the Scherzo and finale, the former a glistening, mercurial dance, con delicatezza indeed, the latter graceful and quixotic, with a hint of emotional ambiguity even in its ostensibly cheerful main theme and a tigerish ferocity in its sudden Beethovenian eruptions. The coupling is generous: the three Klavierstucke, D946, composed, like the sonata, in Schubert’s final year, 1828, and assembled by Brahms for publication. Perhaps Uchida, with her expressive underlinings and lovingly shaded cadences, is a touch winsome in the gentle 6/8 Allegretto that opens the E flat, No. 2: as occasionally in the sonata, I would have liked greater simplicity here. But she brings a wonderfully impassioned sweep, with razor-sharp rhythms, to the opening of the E flat minor, No. 1, and mesmerically floats its slow B major episode (from 1'17''). Like Maria Joao Pires on her recent DG recording (6/98) Uchida also restores the beguiling barcarolle-like episode in A flat that Schubert excised from his autograph manuscript.
The recording finely captures Uchida’s subtle, pellucid sound world. In sum, a revealing disc from a Schubertian of rare insight and spirituality.'