The A minor Sonata emerges as the more arresting of the two in this sixth volume of Kuerti's Schubert cycle. With his so very yielding phrasing, he has frequently preferred to emphasize the more soft-hearted, feminine side of the composer's romanticism. But here, it's the challenging Florestan (if I may be forgiven for borrowing Schumannesque terminology) that we meet, and especially in the first movement, played not only with a consistently maintained tautness of rhythm in response to its allegro giusto marking, but also with vivid contrasts of dynamics and tone-colour. On subsequently reading Kuerti's own insert-note to the work I was not surprised to find that he senses an orchestral inspiration behind the notes. The Andante, with its song melody allowed an easy flow, shows him equally alert to felicities of texture. The finale he plays with a brilliant, darting urgency that not even the pleadingly lyrical second subject can long brake.
In Schubert's last, visionary Sonata, there is no mistaking his awareness of the wonderment behind the first movement's heavenly lengths (he repeats its exposition). But again here, as more than a few times in the past, I think his over-frequent leanings, however minute, on this or that significant note, somehow weaken the music's backbone. It is a kind of point-making that all too soon sounds mannered. The desolation of the Andante sostenuto emerges a bit too static for my own taste. But his contrast of sustained melody and detached left-hand accompaniment is telling; likewise the warm, hymn-like assuagement he brings to the middle section. He makes much—some might think too much—of the ''rough, almost uncouth accents'' in the trio of an otherwise engagingly light-footed Scherzo, and leaves us in no doubt whatsoever about the emotional ambivalence of the finale— even if some of its carefree tripping into the treble trips into near inaudibility. Mellow though it is throughout, the sound quality in general struck me as insufficiently luminous and clear-cut for Schubert.'