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I\u2019m a fellow of diverse musical tastes, and there are a great many composers I love who don\u2019t appear in the meager list over on the right of this page. So it\u2019s a delight to post this recording, because I get to add a \u201cSchubert\u201d category. Yay for Schubert!

This is another one of the recordings I made in the living room of my teacher, Don Betts. He\u2019s playing a little gem of Schubert\u2019s that one doesn\u2019t hear often \u2014 in fact, I\u2019d never heard it at all until he played it for me. When I looked up some recordings by others, I was surprised to find that most people play it very fast, even presto, making it a silly sort of sing-songy horse gallop. Now admittedly I\u2019m a slow tempo kind of guy, and heck, maybe Schubert intended it to be a silly horse gallop, but man do I ever prefer Don\u2019s tempo.

Schubert\u2019s music is a rarified world, full of repeating simple patterns built from the same few simple ingredients, where subtle changes create tremendous moments \u2014 just a shift from minor to major, and a whole new world opens up. In Don\u2019s performance, you can feel the weight of each of those little moments, the overwhelmingly vast interior of this tiny little world, like one of Georgia O\u2019Keefe\u2019s flower paintings.

\n\n\n\n\n\nFranz Schubert\n\n\n\n\u25b6\ufe0f\nPiano Piece D946 No 1 (in E flat minor)\n\n\nDonald Betts, piano\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2b07\ufe0f\nDownload\n\n\n(10:10 / 12.1 M)\n\n\n\n

Speaking of repeating patterns, there\u2019s a stretch at about 1:40 that sounds almost like a bit of 20th century minimalism. I wonder if Philip Glass likes Schubert? (Hmm. Apparently so. You know, you could probably get a decent Glass parody by taking some random Schubert, and repeating each measure 2-4 times.)

I tried a slightly different approach with the sound on this one than with the Arabesque. It still doesn\u2019t sound quite right \u2014 honestly, I wish Don would come to my studio to make some recordings, but he wanted to do this at his house, and when he decides that things should be a certain way, his mind is not easy to change! I guess I sympathize: it\u2019s a bit of a hike over here for him. Anyway, if anybody feels like comparing, let me know what you think of the different sound.