Of all the major European composers in the classic and romantic tradition, none has been viewed through glasses more rose-tinted than Franz Schubert. Schubert! That sweet, innocent creature out of the operetta Blossom Time, with his curly hair, school-teacherish countenance and faint smile, doomed to die young, symphonies unfinished, prodigious talent unrecognized.

Not. According to Elizabeth Norman McKay’s authoritative Oxford biography of 1996, the real Schubert story is one of "alcohol abuse, manic depression, syphilis and hypersexual activity." Even more extraordinary narratives have been proposed by musicologists as notable as Maynard Solomon and Susan McLary and, although some of the more outlandish accounts and interpretations of his life and music have been challenged, there is little doubt any longer that Schubert lived fast and died young. He never was able to keep a job and spent most of his time with a crowd of high lifers and drop-outs of dubious reputation. Some of them were themselves artists, but others were suspicious characters, under surveillance by the police. One of them was arrested in Schubert’s presence and the composer himself was actually threatened with prosecution. For what? Were he and his friends subversives trying to undermine the Austrian Empire? Were they freedom fighters? Terrorists? To what degree were bohemianism and secret sexual "deviation" linked with underground political movements in what was essentially a brutal police state? Historians and musicologists argue about what was actually going on and how deeply Schubert was involved. In any case, this was certainly not Blossom Time.

Joshua Pierce adds his interpretations of Schubert to his extraordinarily vast collection of classical, romantic and modern pianism. Pierce is one of the most versatile virtuosi of our time. His series of recent recordings of major works for piano and orchestra from the great composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the complete Beethoven Concertos to the Schubert solo keyboard masterpieces recorded here to the romantic world of Liszt and Brahms form an extraordinary testimony to the mastery and enormous range of an artist who is also known for his performances of twentieth century repertoire from Gershwin to Cage and beyond. This huge range and varied repertoire – encompassing the standard repertoire, contemporary work and rediscovered masterpieces of the past – are unique among contemporary pianists .