Sherman Plays Schubert

The artist Hans Hofmann once described a painting to a critic as stemming from unbreakable rules. Then he immediately turned to another of his paintings and said he never thought while painting: it interfered with his spontaneity. Sherman's music is that same contrapuntal fission of rule and rebellion, skeleton and soul: structure informed by passion, the premeditated speech tripped up by the spontaneous touch, the push and pull of mind against gland, the classical cape against the romantic thigh, the German scholar and Hungarian guerilla fused so that both exist simultaneously at any given time. As the New York Times has said, "It was the kind of fantastical piano program that Horowitz's playing might have splintered apart with fireworks...But when Russell Sherman played these compositions in Alice Tully Hall the music was glittering, but not fractured; it made sense along with its sound." Sherman is the pianist's pianist, his concerts filled with excited musicians. If you have not been lucky enough to attend his rare, tortured, and ecstatic concerts, we hope this lush Schubert album with its seething undercurrents will, along with his 20-odd other recordings, provide some consolation.