The Carte Blanche format is a programming innovation other festivals would be wise to emulate. Steinberg introduced the Sunday morning concert with an insightful 20-minute preconcert lecture, then Frank played the Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 959, followed by an hourlong "intermission" during which was served a delicious boxed lunch with, fittingly for a Schubertiad, wine. After the break, the concert picked up again with the Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960, followed by a 30-minute postconcert conversation between Frank and Steinberg, and questions from the audience.

You hardly noticed that three-and-a-half hours had past. If it had been in the evening, such a format would have felt interminably long for a chamber music concert (and Schubert sonatas back-to-back could have been a little much), but during the day, it felt mildly invigorating. The senses were reawakened to hear even more of the same after a pause to, quite literally, digest. The singleminded focus on Schubert's last piano sonatas, skillfully employing both words and music, lent the event more drama and educational heft than the usual mixed-bag concert with optional preconcert lecture.

On stage the music, lecture, and conversation were at a consistently high level. Steinberg's opening comments were drawn partly from his engaging new book, For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening, written with Larry Rothe and published in May by Oxford University Press. As he explained, 1828 was a "most extraordinary" year for Schubert: He wrote three exceptional piano sonatas, some significant short piano pieces, the Mass in E-flat, the F-Minor Fantasy for piano duet, the String Quintet in C Major, and the songs later published as Schwanengesang. After this prodigious and inspired output, he died at the age of 31 of typhoid fever following a long battle with syphilis.

Schubert's short, extremely energetic life can be divided into before and after 1822, when he contracted syphilis and a "dark shadow moved over his life and his music lost its innocence," says Steinberg. "In the work of Schubert's last years, we find music that is madly driving and obsessed, strange and fantastical, deeply melancholic, and as violent as anything in Beethoven," Steinberg writes in his book. "'What I produce comes about through my understanding of music and through my pain,' Schubert wrote in his diary, 'and what is produced by pain alone seems to please the world least.'"

He is referring in particular to his dumbfounded friends who first heard the intense 1827 Winterreise song cycle. But the same could apply to his posthumously published late piano music, which seemed to be mostly ignored, except by a few other composers like Schumann, until the middle of the 20th century. Even Schumann said of them unenthusiastically in his journal Neue Zeitschrift für Muzik, "Always musical and rich in songlike themes, these pieces ripple on, page after page. …."

Such a reaction may have been true of 19th century Vienna, but starting in the 1940s with piano great Artur Schnabel, Claude Frank's teacher, the integration of Schubert's sonatas into the pianists' repertoire would solidify, as Frank remembered in his conversation with Steinberg after the concert. "Schnabel's love of Schubert was undeniable," said Frank. "No matter what he played, Schubert came out in the piece."

Pianist Glenn Gould has said that "Schnabel represented a way of looking almost directly at the music and bypassing the instrument." The same can be said of his student. In the second half, during the Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960, Frank crafted a performance of astonishing transparency and clarity out of Schubert's melancholy. Frank has a light yet controlled style, full of flowing legato melodies, insistently grumbling bass lines, careful dynamic variation, graceful arcs of rubato playing, and long-held final notes. He brought out the darkness — sometimes terrifying — that always seems to mutate so quickly out of Schubert's fleeting passages of happiness.

He gave unmatched articulation to the dissonances that pop out of the musical fabric in the first movement. In the second, he evoked something more than melancholy from the haunting melodies. It was true compassion for the universal plight of humanity. Throughout, every note held inner meanings, with accents never quite where you expected. Frank has been playing this music his entire life, which at 81 years has been long, and it shows. With age comes not just wisdom, but enlightenment.

If only the first half had been as transcendent. The same problem that plagued his last performance at Music@Menlo — missed or dropped notes and muddy playing — cropped up again repeatedly in the Sonata in A Major, D. 959. Perhaps it was the morning hour, the arthritis that is said to bother him, or the fact that he only arrived late the night before because of flight delays. Whatever the cause, the problem marred the fast passages, made worse by his Glenn Gould-like habit of singing and even slightly whistling along with the music. It's somewhat quaint in Gould's recordings, plus this music is intensely songlike, but the sound is nonetheless as maddening as a mosquito buzzing around the room.

Still, Frank played with a deliberate and unhurried air in one movement after another, as the theme swirled and repeated in long singing lines. Sudden fortissimo was met with still pianissimo. Light shined through the darkness. By the end, all with Schubert was sublime, always rolling and wandering onward.

(Mickey Butts is executive director, editor, and publisher of San Francisco Classical Voice. His writing has appeared in Salon, The Nation, Food & Wine, The Financial Times, The Industry Standard, Wired, and The San Francisco Chronicle.)

©2006 Mickey Butts, all rights reserved