Album: Schubert Piano Sonatas, Vol. 1
Artist: Martin Helmchen, piano
Label: Alpha Classics (2025)
Sonatas: D 157, D 571 (with completions), D 850, D 279 (with Badura-Skoda completion), D 784, D 664
Instrument: Bösendorfer 280 Vienna Concert
Available on all streaming platforms
By Damián Autorino
Editor at Moto Perpetuo
It’s not every day that a pianist with such a deep understanding of Schubert’s style decides to embark on a complete sonata cycle. With this first volume, Martin Helmchen opens a long-term project that mixes the familiar with the less travelled — and places the spotlight on a part of Schubert’s catalogue that still feels underestimated: the early and unfinished sonatas.
Helmchen admits that he discovered many of these sonatas “surprisingly late”, and that once he started reading and listening to them carefully, he was “absolutely blown away” by their originality . This first volume reflects that fascination. Alongside the well-known D 850 and the dark A minor Sonata, D 784, he includes works like D 157, D 279, and the fragmentary F-sharp minor Sonata, D 571 — pieces that Schubert often left incomplete not because of artistic hesitation, but simply because, as Helmchen says, he sometimes didn’t “have enough money to buy another piece of paper”.
Incomplete doesn’t mean insignificant. One of the interesting threads in this album is the way Helmchen handles Schubert’s unfinished pages. Following the tradition of Paul Badura-Skoda, he uses the veteran pianist’s completion for the finale of D 279; in the case of D 571, he offers his own additions, based on the surviving material and the manuscript’s context. The result is not speculative ornamentation, but a practical, musician-to-musician attempt to make these works playable and coherent without pretending they are something they are not.
The choice of instrument also shapes the narrative. Helmchen recorded on a Bösendorfer 280 Vienna Concert. This piano brings clarity to Schubert’s textures while giving the bass a warmth that suits both the lyrical intimacy of D 664 and the more extroverted writing of the Gasteiner Sonata, D 850. It’s a sound that avoids excess weight and lets the music breathe — an important detail in sonatas where transparency is everything.
This first volume covers a wide spectrum of Schubert’s development: the youthful brightness of D 157, the C-major world of D 279, the unsettling shadows of D 784, and the elegant lyricism of D 664. Helmchen himself describes D 784 as “the darkest and most desperate” of all the sonatas, with abrupt jumps from pianissimo to fortissimo and a sense of never arriving anywhere — an insight that helps frame the emotional contrast in this selection.
At the end of the Alpha Classics video, Helmchen shares a thought that stays with you: if he had three wishes, one would be that Schubert could know how much his music is loved today, and how deeply we value works he probably believed would remain unheard. That sentiment alone seems to guide this entire project.
A cycle that promises to reveal not only what Schubert wrote, but what he left behind — and why those unfinished corners matter.
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