Claudio Arrau - Schumann: Piano Works (1991)

Deep thought, care and love pervade this newest contribution to Arrau's Schumann cycle, just as they did all the others. The discovery for me was the Blumenstück, which if played at all (it isn't often) so easily emerges like some pretty but pale little drawing-room aquarelle. But not from Arrau. Characteristically, he reads between the lines of every bar, and discovers as much to express as in any of Schumann's wholly introspective pieces. I was amazed at the variety of mood he extracts from the work's not greatly varied figuration throughout the sequence of brief, closely related sections.

As for Kinderscenen, sharing the second side, I think the nature of the interpretation is best summed up by the title Schumann gives his tenth piece, "Almost too serious". But apart from an over-pedalled and thick-sounding "Knight of the Hobby-Horse", all these miniatures are intimately cherished.

Papillons, starting the first side, could also only have come from Arrau in its depth of sonority and feeling, with tempo sometimes a little more leisurely than we often hear to accommodate the can amore approach. I was now and again puzzled by his decisions about repeats-or perhaps they come from some new edition? For instance, we often hear the main section of No. 2 played twice in order to include the textual variant that Schumann himself is said to have sometimes played in bars 9 and 10. But I can't remember ever having heard the four-bar introduction repeated too. Nor, surely, is it usual to repeat the second half of No. 11? Yet Arrau does not repeat the first eight bars of No. 5, which I think is a loss since it robs him of the chance of observing Schumann's basso cantando the second time. The record is completed by the three Romances, of which the first and last are as rarely heard as the second is well known. The depth of tone Arrau favours, together with the very resonant acoustic, have their dangers: sometimes texture sounds a bit thick. I would even have liked more of a luminous glow to the lovely tune of No. 2. But again here there is no mistaking Arrau's intensity of feeling. -- Joan Chissell