Schubert’s G major Sonata, D894, written in the autumn of 1826, is the ultimate Fruhlingstraum. Pervading the entire work, though played out particularly eloquently in the structure of its first movement, is that oscillation between light-filled dream and stark waking reality. These may be juxtaposed in dramatic motivic contrast, but they are, quintessentially, twin sides of a single consciousness; and it is Mitsuko Uchida’s supreme achievement to understand and re-create precisely this quality. Brendel, of course, knows it too: like him, Uchida creates a true opening molto moderato of profound stillness and long distances. Chords really resonate and breathe out, yet her quick intakes of breath as the second subject steps into dance are tempered with the more flexible, whimsical intimacy of a Schiff. Uchida’s gentleness of touch is ballasted by a firmly delineated bass and a weight of rhythmic articulation (10'10'' on) equal to Brendel’s, though actually surpassing him in resonance. For her, Schubert’s heart of darkness beats frighteningly strongly.
She finds an easy, instinctive pace for the Andante creating, again as part of an organically unified vision, fiercely compacted shocks in the ringing chords of its minor-key episodes. These chords announce a Menuetto in which the Trio slinks in as the merest spectre of a Landler (surely to make a deep imprint on Mahler’s spirit), and leads to a finale in which Uchida, uniquely, creates a dance of the spirit within a deep inner stillness.
The Relique Sonata, D840, one of Schubert’s great and tantalizingly unfinished works, sounds entire, fully achieved in Uchida’s hands. She shares with Schiff a leisured and long-pondered playing-out of the first movement in its strong rhythmic unity – a quite different response from the urgent, less ‘private’ playing of Brendel here. And her Andante is no less intimate in its bel canto of minute nuance and inflexion, starker and bleaker still than Schiff’s masterpiece.'