Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s Schubert Ländler album receives review from Gramophone

Schubert composed around 450 dances for piano. While their original function may have been modest, all are exemplary of their kind, and there are some real gems hidden among the everyday majority.

‘Ländler’ is a convenient shorthand for titles that also comprise écossaises, waltzes, original dances, Viennese ladies’ dances, valses nobles, valses sentimentales (as Ravel surely took note), German dances and the odd galop. Pierre-Laurent Aimard has here selected something like 107 pieces, cannily grouping them so that each of the 45 tracks, averaging one to two minutes, makes a satisfying miniature medley.

True, some of the dances suggest high-class musical wallpaper, and some would not have been out of place in that most sugary of operettas, Lilac Time. But others breathe an echt Schubertian air of melancholy. Some evoke a village band atmosphere prefiguring Mahler, and some even breathe a thoughtful sophistication that could easily have found a home in one of the sonatas. Most remarkably, in the D790 German Dances, something seems to have got into Schubert, nudging him into the appoggiatura-laden expressive world of his songs and quartets.

Such exceptional moments are as much a tribute to Aimard as to Schubert. His supple, understated rubato shows a natural feeling for the idiom, and he is not afraid to scale up the prevailing modesty of tone to give the chunkier dances some Brahmsian heft. Less appealing, I have to say, is the basic sound quality, which has a slight unyielding hardness in fortissimo, and even comes with an occasional touch of ‘yowl’ that betrays less than perfectly regulated dampers. Admittedly this last reservation only surfaces on the closest listening, and I might not have mentioned it at all had Aimard himself not lavished praise on his 1956 58 instrument and on the technicians who prepared it. I’m also no fan of the flowery fantasies of his accompanying essay. Still, much thought and sensitivity have gone into this disc, and much pleasure can be derived from it.