Schumann: Kreisleriana, (Slåttebrekk, Endres)

Two wonderful and mystifyingly obscure performances of this masterwork. It’s hard to imagine a set of pieces that better represents Schumann’s style -- every imaginable Schumanesque feature is here in abundance: accents on wrong beats, misplaced bar lines, muscular & jerkily taut fast sections, slow sections that are either rapt or sphinxlike, counterpoint of incredible expressiveness (Schumann studied the WTC very seriously, and his contrapuntal ability is too rarely acknowledged), drastically contrasting