British pianist dusts off Schubert with a deft touch, busting myths along the way

What wonders would behold us had Schubert not died at 31. After enchanting audiences with hundreds of songs about love, longing and nature, and scores of atmospheric piano miniatures, he took to writing some of his most introspective works in the last years of his short life. Mumbai is no stranger to the Viennese master, but perhaps for the first time, all the 11 piano sonatas that he completed are being presented here as a set, over three years.
Bringing the works to town is British concert pianist James Lisney, who is not a household name, but has won acclaim among connoisseurs of the chamber repertoire, which is where the soul of Western classical music lies.He was born to a chartered engineer and a school nurse, “people of modest means, but with a strong appreciation of education”, and among their three boys, is the only one who became a professional musician. His own family is intensely musical, though. His wife is a violin teacher, elder daughter a cellist, conductor and composer with whom he plays in duo, and younger daughter a violinist.
Lisney’s aim is to debunk some myths about Schubert, “often mis-characterized as a depressive, sentimental composer”. That this is done is not surprising, given that Europe’s increasing prosperity, especially in the post-war years, led to a sort of rewriting of art history and the airbrushing of pesky particulars. Schubert, for example, was once arrested for subversion and also suffered under censorship. His salacious sex life, though, has been far more palatable.
The pianist says the composer’s early death “encourages one to give almost everything he wrote a pompous, valedictory character”.
“My job is to show that he was a young genius, alive and aware in a Vienna that was marked with poverty, had an authoritarian government, and was under attack from Napoleon—as well as containing moments of blissful happiness, the rhythms of dance and horses—and a close proximity to the countryside. An intense form of experience that is not open to many of us today.”
Lisney presented his first complete Schubert Cycle in 2000 in London, and included all 21 of the composer’s piano sonatas, 10 of which are unfinished works or parts of which are supposed to have been lost. Since then, he has presented different kinds of Schubert cycles around Europe.
The version he is bringing to Mumbai includes the last three sonatas, all of which were written in 1828, the composer’s final year. Believed to be homages to Beethoven, who Schubert venerated, these works took over a hundred years to gain acceptance on the concert stage, and it was only in the last decades of the 20th century that they were exalted to almost the same level of transcendence as the older composer’s last piano sonatas.
Lisney, who is 55, shifted his focus to Schubert when he turned 30. “I thought I would see what it was like to concentrate on one composer and as Schubert’s bicentenary was approaching in 1997, I started to study his piano works, his chamber music and the rich repertoire of Lied,” the pianist says (the term Lied is singular for Lieder, a German song tradition that blossomed in the 19th century as a fusion of poetry and music; Schubert and Schumann were its most renowned exponents).
A deep study of Schubert, Lisney says, took him to “a different level of artistic engagement”. “Schubert was a particularly potent subject as I discovered that there was still a great deal of fluidity in how one could interpret his music… I felt, in a modest way, that I was breaking new ground.”
The sonatas in Lisney’s first set of Mumbai recitals, on Saturday and Sunday at the Experimental Theatre, NCPA, will be, as known by their catalogue numbers, D 537, 664, 894 (the pianist’s current favourite) and 959. The programme, being hosted by the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation, will be interspersed with some of Chopin’s most well-loved pieces, including the famous Andante Spianato & Grande Polonaise Brillante. “I am still undecided about the programme for my second visit (next year), but I suspect that it will include the beloved D 960 (the alphabet stands for Austrian musicologist Otto Erich Deutsch, who made the first comprehensive compilation of Schubert's compositions). This ‘final’ sonata gets plenty of representation on the concert platform and I want audiences to engage equally with the earlier and middle period sonatas that are rarely performed outside of integral presentations.”