The large and technically demanding G major Sonata was composed two years before Schubert’s death in October 1826 and is one of only three piano sonatas that appeared in print during his lifetime. The unusual title of the first edition “Fantasie, Andante, Menuetto und Allegretto” stems from the publisher Haslinger and is probably due to the dreamy-melancholy underlying mood of the first movement which corresponded little to the traditional concepts of a sonata’s first movement.

It is hardly s...