Schubertiade

It was standing in for renowned colleague Hélène Grimaud that made David Fray a shooting star on the international pianist scene, so to speak, overnight in 2006. Just three years later, the German Phono Academy awarded him the Echo Classic Prize in the “Instrumentalist of the Year” category. And a year after that, he was awarded the coveted French music prize Les Victoires de la Musique. When asked about his pianistic role model, he names the German grand seigneur Wilhelm Kempff (1895 – 1991), one of the most profound Schubert interpreters. Now David Fray follows in his footsteps with an equally wonderfully singing, melodically accentuated piano playing, in which he sometimes hesitantly gropes, then again in a murmuring tone of voice, through Schubert’s sound worlds that are, as it were, self-forgetting and at peace with themselves. Spiegel” described him as “one of the most independent piano spirits of the present” – high praise for a still young great.