Home listening - in stormy times, Schubert is balm for the soul

The Guardian 0

Two new piano recordings, by Duo Pleyel and Shai Wosner, provide complementary consolation on period and modern instruments

• “There’s no love song finer/ But how strange the change/ From major to minor”, as Cole Porter observed in his Great American Songbook classic Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye (1944). Surely he had Franz Schubert (1797-1828) in mind when he wrote those words, though. In Schubert’s case it’s as often the change from minor to major, the light that comes from darkness, the smile out of the frown, that is strange, and affecting. Our own goodbyes, courtesy of Covid-19, include a farewell to normal concert life. There’s no “ev’ry time” here. Online streaming has become the new “live”, and recordings must quench all our other musical needs, unless we can make music ourselves (at a safe social distance).

Will anyone dare play duets, a perfect domestic activity, in this becalmed existence?

Related: Classical music: let the Berlin Phil come to you