Schubert: Impromptus - Le Voyage Magnifique

Forget the frilly packaging, and well-meaning but vacuous poetic musings penned by the pianist. Concentrate instead on her absorbing, unpressured, and totally unselfregarding performances. There's an instinctive, even improvisatory quality about Pires's music-making that arises from having long digested and internalized these works in her mind and body. The epic C Minor and F Minor impromptus and the Klavierstüke (all repeats intact) find Pires probing the disquiet bubbling beneath Schubert's lyrical surface, yet she avoids enacting her discoveries. Pires's dedication of this two-disc set to Sviatoslav Richter's memory could hardly be more appropriate. --Jed Distler