Sir András Schiff in Recital

Long revered for his elegant, honest, and emotionally direct accounts of the core Austro-German piano repertoire, Sir András Schiff has chosen a luminous programme of masterpieces for his Saffron Hall recital. In addition to the delightfully cheerful Sonata HXVI:50 composed during Haydn’s second visit to England, and the equally charming K.545 by Mozart (a deceptively simple work composed, as Mozart noted, ‘for beginners’), Schiff offers two much more emotionally challenging works as a contrast. Beethoven’s late Sonata Op.109 in E major contains a remarkable set of emotionally wide-ranging variations in its third movement, and Schubert’s stormy and tormented Sonata in C minor was written towards the end of the composer’s tragically short life.