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Otto Erich Deutsch's chronologically arranged catalogue of Schubert's oevre places composition of the three works recorded here between March and April 1816. 1816 has been called by several biographers "Schubert's Mozart year." Schubert certainly would have played Mozart chamber music with his family quartet (in which he was the violist), and had numerous opportunities to broaden his acquaintance with larger-scale works of that composer and of other talented musicians. The three sonatas on this disc clearly take as their point of departure Mozart's Op. 1 and Op. 2 sonatas (K 301-306, K296, and K376-380), sharing with them not only their basic format and texture, but incorporating, in a thoroughly personal way, elements of Mozart's chromaticism, major/minor mode alternations, and exotic, remote modulations. But throughout, Schubert's own personality asserts itself repeatedly, revealing his unique grasp of the ineffable, which Stravinsky likened to glimpses of Paradise. The performance presented here uses instruments set up as they would have been in Schubert's day. The six-octave piano by Thomas and Barbara Wolf is based on surviving Viennese instruments by Nannette Streicher and Johann Ehlers that are roughly contemporary with the three sonatas. Ms. Beths' Stradivarius violin is strung in gut, rather than with today's nearly ubiquitous metal or synthetic/metal strings, again affording a wider spectrum of timbres. Throughout, we have employed a considerable amount of rhythmic freedom, including a Mozartean rubato in which melody and accompaniment are at times deliberately misaligned, in order to help project our perception of these pieces as both lyrical and essentially theatrical in nature.

—from Kenneth Slowik's liner essay