Barnes & Noble

If Mitsuko Uchida can't make you fall in love with Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, there's probably no hope. Even more than Alfred Brendel, in his beautifully thought out recording with Michael Gielen (also on Philips), Uchida proves that Schoenberg's music is just as warm, passionate, and finely wrought as Brahms's. One simply has to get used to the dissonant language. Pierre Boulez, leading the Cleveland Orchestra, gives one of the most eloquent performances of his long career, matching Uchida's heartfelt devotion phrase for phrase. The pianist's interpretation of Webern's understated Variations, Op. 27 is also a revelation, coming closest to realizing the detailed expressive directions left by the composer in a special manuscript. Glenn Gould (Sony) may find more intensity in Schoenberg's Three Pieces, Op. 11, but again, Uchida shows the music's deep connection with Brahms's late intermezzos. The program closes with Berg's early Sonata, a work that teeters on the brink of tonality. Uchida makes it into a dizzyingly sensuous pianistic Liebestod, at once intoxicatingly delicate and extraordinarily powerful. Not to be missed! Andrew Farach-Colton

Gramophone

Uchida brings a marvellous spontaneity and sense of drama to the more overtly romantic compositions here -- Berg's Sonata and Schoenberg's Op. 11 Pieces. This is certainly not one of those accounts of the Berg where you question the composer's wisdom in marking the first section for repeat. As for the Schoenberg, never have I been more aware of this music's closeness in time and spirit to the cataclysmic world of the monodrama Erwartung. Arnold Whittall