Star Of Heaven, The Eton Choirbook Legacy – The Sixteen

   in Piano International (Sep, 2016)
‘Understated’ (appropriately so); ‘natural’; ‘responsive to the composer’s needs’; ‘lets the music peak for itself’; ‘little searching for exaggerated effects’: these are qualities that have been singled out for praise in Janina Fialkowska’s previous recordings and they apply in bucketloads to this latest disc. The combination of Schubert’s early Sonata No 7 (1817 – he was just 20) with the late, final quartet of Impromptus (he was still only 31) is neatly judged, the Sonata beginning to show the move towards later Beethoven, while the Impromptus look beyond, to the self-defining structures of high Romanticism.

In the Sonata, Fialkowska is more classically inclined than, say, András Schiff; she is quicker in …