Schubert, Vol. 2

Album review

Much as his students at the Conservatories of Lyon and Paris adore him, Denis Pascal still took the time to carve himself out a great personal career as a musician, over the course of which he has tackled a whole series of composers. After a very well-regarded first album dedicated to Schubert, this second volume confirms this charismatic pianist's closeness to that world where, as he put it, it's a matter of "obsessively evoking the passage of time, the impossibility of realising oneself, of seizing a little of our lives, like water from the stream, like love". For all that, Denis Pascal's piano is clear and lucid. Schubert's great melancholy is handled with a gentle touch; it seems ineffable and full of things unsaid. His vision isn't metaphysical, but profoundly innocent, simple, and natural, which perhaps renders it all the more moving. And more mysterious. As he says himself: "Seeing a part of ourselves in Schubert means reading without fear, heart to heart, forgetting that this is a masterpiece." It's the veiled sun, the unresolved doubts of the "ineluctable flow towards dissolution" which Denis Pascal shows us here in his dialogue with Schubert. © François Hudry/Qobuz