SCHUBERT Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960

David Korevaar, a favorite of festival audiences and Boulder locals, is a Distinguished Professor and the Helen and Peter Weil Faculty Fellow at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

This sonata is one of the last pieces Schubert wrote for solo piano, composed during the last months of his life in 1828 but not published until ten years later. The piece is almost Mahlerian in scope and suited for our current situation. In a New Yorker interview in 2015, pianist Sir András Schiff said, “These last two movements are like a hallucination of a new life. They are what the dying person might experience on the threshold. The coda has a wonderful, chaotic joy in it: this rushing out, this looking for the final exit, this last flourish. Schubert is saying yes to life. There is still hope.”

For more on the musical connections between Schubert and Mahler see this video from the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Here is an essay from Kenneth Woods on Schubert’s B-flat and C minor Sonatas on the MahlerFest blog.

The first video below is discussion between Woods and Korevaar about this sonata and is available immediately.

Korevaar has also let us know that he has three other Schubert sonatas available online:

Conversation Video

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Performance Video

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To be released on Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 3:30 PM MDT.

Click here to view the full 2020 Virtual Colorado MahlerFest schedule.

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