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Keyboard Sonatas

Johann Schobert (not to be confused with Franz Schubert) was a composer and virtuoso keyboardist active in Paris in the 1760s. He is best remembered - when remembered at all - for his remarkable & lamentable demise: "Schobert went mushroom picking with his family [...] near Paris. He tried to have a local chef prepare them, but was told they were poisonous. After unsuccessfully trying again at a restaurant at Bois de Boulogne, and being incorrectly told by a doctor acquaintance of his that the mushrooms were edible, he decided to use them to make a soup at home. Schobert, his wife, all but one of their children, and his doctor friend died."

The third quarter of the 18th century was roughly the period when the newfangled "piano forte" was supplanting the harpsichord as the default keyboard instrument. As with many new technologies, a variety of piano designs proliferated early in the instrument's history, before standardisation set in. One of the variants which didn't survive into the mid-19th century was the "Tangent Piano", which has been described as combining the qualities of the harpsichord and the piano, with a sound resembling the former instrument in its bass range and the latter at the treble end of the keyboard.

The sonatas on the present disc (on the Hungaroton label) were originally published as for the harpsichord "with ad-lib violin accompaniment", that is, only a keyboard part was written out, with the expectation that a violinist would improvise over it. The same pieces were also published as for the piano - so hearing them on a tangent piano seems like a good way of suggesting something of both those possibilities. Miklós Spányi is the keyboardist here, with Péter Szüts contributing the violin part. The pieces themselves, two from Schobert's op. 3 and one from op. 1, are delightful: fresh and tuneful, but also with some hints of an underlying darkness not always present in mid-18th-century music. The performances and the recording strike me as excellent.

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