Schubert - Piano Sonata D960, Moments musicaux D780 - Clifford Curzon - 1973

Particularly in the late 1960s, Decca made dozens of delicious recordings at The Maltings, Snape, which was restored as a concert hall in 1967 for Benjamin Britten's Aldeburgh Festival. Clifford Curzon, heard here during his "burnt amber years", was a celebrated British pianist, born in 1907, debuted with Henry Wood conducting a Bach Triple Concerto at a Prom concert in 1923. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Music, he later studied with Landowska and Boulanger in Paris.



Schubert was right up Curzon's alley and, while he did premiere some works of his contemporaries (such as Lennox Berkeley's Piano Sonata), he is best known for the Austro-German classics of the 18th and 19th century. His gorgeous understated lyricism is in full flight for the Piano Sonata in B flat, recorded in 1970 at the Maltings.

But don't overlook the slightly earlier recording of the Moments Musicaux made in Vienna's Sofiensaal in Jun 1964 under the supervision of the great recording team of Ray Minshull and John Culshaw.