Wigmore Hall, London
It's little over a month since Maurizio Pollini played the last three Schubert piano sonatas in a single evening at the Festival Hall. Steven Osborne devoted his Wigmore Hall recital to the same exercise, yet despite the neat logic of such a programme and, being the last instrumental works Schubert composed, the sense of valediction about it, you can have too much of a good thing.
Playing Beethoven's last three sonatas together might be one thing, but tackling the Schubert triptych is quite another, for while the Beethoven works are exercises in compression, in distilling classical sonata form down to its essence, Schubert's late works do the opposite, and test the limits of what the classical framework can contain. Hearing three great works that do that in a single evening is asking too much of the audience and the pianist. Each sonata demands more space around it than such programming allows. In Osborne's recital it was the central work, the A major Sonata D959, that suffered most, following so closely the explosive energy of the C minor D958, and anticipating the expansiveness of the B flat D960.
The performance of the A major sonata had many beautiful moments, and Osborne's crystalline way with its kaleidoscopic modulations was a delight. But the work's scale and grandeur were undervalued in a way that, you imagine, they would not have been as part of a more varied programme. There were fine things in the other works as well – not least the lack of mannerism, which is such a refreshing characteristic of Osborne's playing, and the understated directness of his phrasing, which never lapses into the matter of fact. But in glorious isolation, each of the sonatas would have snapped into sharper focus.