Piano Sonatas

After completing the entire recording of Schubert's piano sonatas, Martin Helmchen is now dedicating himself to a new solo project consisting of four double albums to be released in 2028, the two-hundredth anniversary of the composer's death. Martin Helmchen waited until he was 40 to embark on this adventure, because in his opinion an artist must be mature to handle the challenges posed by the radical contrasts in Schubert's sonatas: "constant but never unnecessarily complex virtuosity alongside austere inner depth, the exuberant joy of the ländler and flashes of dramatic madness." Recording a complete work also meant carefully studying the scores and grappling with the question of which parts the composer left unfinished, or whether one should stop at the point where Schubert stopped composing, because he felt he could no longer compose. Did Schubert stop composing because he either ran out of time or didn't have enough money to buy music paper? Helmchen has decided to complete these parts, inspired by the recordings and especially the analyses of the eminent pianist Paul Badura-Skoda. This first part contains sonatas composed between 1815 (Schubert was 18) and 1825. The entire cycle was recorded on a Bösendorfer grand piano at the Kronberg Academie.