Lawrence M. Zbikowski

Bio: Lawrence M. Zbikowski is an academic researcher. The author has co-authored 1 publications.

Schubert (Re)Inventions - Ensemble Palladino: Alberto Mesirca gui, Ursula Langmayr sop, Eric Lamb fl, Firmian Lermer vla, Martin Rummel vc - Paladino Music 58, 2015 (2 CDs: 133 minutes), $28

Abstract: Franz Schubert’s alliance with the guitar is a cause that has often been celebrated, most typically by guitarists eager to find a confederate in one of Europe’s most celebrated composers. A.P. Sharpe, for instance, in his Story of the Spanish Guitar, suggested that the instrument was Schubert’s near-constant companion: ‘For many years Franz Schubert, not possessing a piano, did most of his composing on the guitar which hung over his bed and on which he would play before rising’. Sharpe’s enthusiasms notwithstanding, there is actually rather little evidence that the composer had any knowledge of or involvement with the guitar beyond what might have been expected of most musicians living in Austria in the early years of the nineteenth century. While it is true that Schubert provided a guitar accompaniment for an 1813 vocal trio to celebrate his father’s name day (‘Zur Namensfeier meines Vaters’, D. 80), this hardly makes him a dedicated guitarist: the accompaniment, while competent enough, is rather clumsy in places, bespeaking a lack of familiarity with idiomatic writing for the instrument. And while it is also true that many of Schubert’s songs were published with guitar accompaniments during his lifetime, there is no evidence that he viewed such arrangements as anything other than a strategy employed by his publishers to increase sales. This leaves us with the rather confusing situation created by the work with which Ensemble Palladino opens this two-CD collection of Schubert’s music featuring the guitar: the Notturno in D major for guitar, flute, viola, and cello (D. Anhang II/2). Although the work (here and elsewhere) is attributed to Schubert, that claim is rather tenuous, as the Notturno is simply an arrangement Schubert made in February 1814 of a trio for guitar, flute and viola composed by Wenzel Matiegka, first published by Artaria in 1807. The attribution surely will not do any lasting harm to our understanding of either Schubert’s or Matiegka’s legacy – Schubert did, after all, add the cello part and substantially alter the viola part of Matiegka’s composition – but inasmuch as the guitar part is left almost completely untouched the work provides no evidence that Schubert’s friendship with the guitar was anything more than of the most passing sort. Abandoning the notion that Schubert had any close affiliation with the guitar in no way diminishes the value of reimagining his works through arrangements for the instrument. It does, however, put this volume of Ensemble Palladino’s (Re)Inventions in a somewhat different light: where previous recordings in the series found flautist Eric Lamb and cellist Martin Rummel reinterpreting keyboard works by J.S. Bach (PaladinoMusic 39), and a range of instrumental and vocal compositions byW.A.Mozart (PaladinoMusic 50), Schubert (Re)Inventions is