Schubert- Complete Works for Violin and Piano, Vol. 1: (3) Sonatas / Rondo, d. 384,385,408,895

Julia Fischer and Martin Helmchen adopt a rather quick tempo and a light touch, hardly too heavily pedaled in the piano part, in the opening of the first movement of Schubert's First Sonata in D Major, a work that could lend itself, slight as it may be, to overblown Romantic rhetoric (although not in leaner and more spirited readings like that of Joseph Szigeti, who recorded the Sonata with Andor F”ldes in 1942, a performance re-released in Sony's "Masterworks Portrait" series 52538 in 1992). Their kind of reading lends the work a freshness that period instrumentalists (such as Andrew Manze on Harmonia Mundi 907455, whose somewhat more nuanced reading on period instruments I urgently recommended in 31:6) might envy. The same approach yields dividends in the opening theme of the second movement. At its quicker tempo, the rapid passagework in the last movement sparkles. The contrasts in dynamics sound pointed and the dialogue between the instruments, especially bright.