Hough's sensitive performances of Schubert's deceptively plain-speaking late sonatas bring out their Classical grace and structural rigour.

Stephen Hough's moving performance of D960 is marked throughout by refined, discerning pianism and an uncommonly subtle ear for texture.
In all four movements, he seeks out the music's inwardness and fragility, its ethereal, self-communing remoteness. The opening Molto moderato, unfolding in vast, calm spans, has a hypnotic inevitability; there are countless felicities of timing and colour, but always a vital sense of forward motion. Hough adopts a dangerously slow tempo in the Andante but sustains it through the breadth and concentration of his line, the subtlety of his tonal palette and his pointing of rhythmic detail. His rarefied grace and delicacy, his gentle probing of the music's vulnerability, are of a piece with his conception of the sonata as a whole.
As usual, Hyperion doesn't stint over playing time, offering another complete sonata in addition to the two-movement fragment, D613.
D784, perhaps Schubert's most depressive instrumental work, is magnificently done.
Hough distils an immense weight of suffering from the pervasive two-note motif that dominates the first movement like some massive, Wagnerian pendulum; but, typically, the lyrical music is limpidly coloured and poignantly inflected, with an unusually precise observation of Schubert's accents. The Andante is flowing and long-arched, with some ravishing soft play- ing, and he a brings a superb rhythmic impulse to the eerily scudding counterpoint of the main subject and a piercing tenderness to the contrasting F major theme. The fragmentary C major Sonata, D613, one of numerous Schubert torsos from the years 1817-22, is no great shakes: two pleasant but uneventful movements, both incomplete. The recording is of exemplary clarity, warmth and truthfulness.