"Schubert's sonatas occur in a mysterious way; to put it in more Austrian terms: they happen," wrote Alfred Brendel in a famous Schubert essay. Rhapsodic melodies and uncanny nuances, circulation and immobility are the poles that herald the "befreite Zeit" in Schubert's last of the three "Grandes Sonates". In his famous seventh sonata, Prokofiev lets relentlessly hard percussion salvos hammer into the piano, but also counters the theater of war with an "Andante caloroso". In between, Liszt's Petrarch-inspired sonnets open up completely new sonic spaces. Lukas Sternath, currently one of the brightest stars in the pianist firmament, has the class to mediate between all these worlds.