Andrea Bedetti reviews Ingrid Carbone’s second CD “Schubert: L’enchantement retrouvé”.
The Moments musicaux, with the Impromptus, are among the great works of Schubert’s maturity, taking into account that they were conceived during the most advanced phase of Schubert’s creative parable, i.e. between 1823 and 1828. What matters to know is not so much whether these pages should be inscribed in the sphere of a possible and presumed unity of intent or whether, on the contrary, they should be considered loose passages, the combination of which was only due to purely editorial reasons; whatever the truth, what is most important is the fact that Schubert was able to demonstrate through them how the piano was now an instrument capable of expressing with a few, synthetic traces, a sensation, a state of mind or a fleeting thought , both of joy and of sadness, that is to highlight one of the messages that were most dear to romantic aesthetics, namely the capacity, but it would be better to say the “synchrony”, through which the artist had to give plastic life to the fleeting, fleeting vision with which he was imbued at that precise moment (the age-old “Stop for a moment, you’re beautiful!” of Faustian memory).
“I have already dealt with the Cosenza pianist Ingrid Carbone, when reviewing this magazine, already on the occasion of the release of her album dedicated to Liszt, again for Da Vinci Classics, and when she let me know that she was about to record the op. 90 & the op. 94 by Schubert on a Bechstein piano, I thought it was a gamble, a challenge that could have had, from a timbral and phrasing point of view, an unsatisfactory outcome given that the mechanics of this instrument do not guarantee the “fluidity” necessary for tackle and make the most of these pages, as happens instead with a Steinway or a Fazioli.”