Recording details: February 1991 Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, Hampstead, London, United Kingdom Produced by Martin Compton Engineered by Tony Faulkner The proprietary pride that Vienna feels in Franz Schubert might be less smug if it was more generally known that far from coming from a family established in the city for generations, he was the son of immigrants of a type somewhat resented in the Austria of today: both his parents came from 'the East'—what is now Czechoslovakia. As John Reed has written 'The people of these lands show a deep native feeling for the joy and sadness of life; and the poetry of Schubert's music, its love of dance rhythms and emotional ambiguity, owes more to the home of his forefathers than it does to Vienna.' There are moments in the music when it is quite easy to imagine Schubert as the countryman of Dvorak and Smetana, rather than of Mozart and Beethoven. Schubert's parents met in Vienna, driven there by the f...