(Mikhail Pletnev | 1999 | Live) Schumann: Symphonic Etudes,

If my friends in the piano world is anything to go by this is a performance you’ll either love or hate. As with almost everything Pletnev plays my view is that it scores dizzyingly high on the artistic scale, sufficient to all by itself reveal Pletnev as one of the greatest musicians of all time, had we had nothing else from him. But at the same time I wouldn’t want to be without the more “natural“ renditions of the variations, which have come from the likes of Claudio Arrau, Emil Gilels, and Maria Grinberg, with the humanistic at the center, rather than the artistic, as here. Pletnev plays his own edit of the set which omits the 10th Etude and adds two of the variations from the addendum Johannes Brahms published posthumously. The plan follows below, but with timings simply as information, since it’s meant to be heard as an integral composition. Schumann: Etudes Symphoniques, 00:00 - Theme 01:24 - Etude I (Variation 1) 02:27 - Etude II (Variation 2) 04:04 - Etude III 04:57 - Etude IV (Variation 3) 05:38 - Etude V (Variation 4) 06:26 - Etude VI (Variation 5) 07:00 - Etude VII (Variation 6) 07:47 - Etude VIII (Variation 7) 09:11 - Op. posth - Variation 5 11:15 - Op. posth - Variation 1 11:59 - Etude IX 12:33 - Etude XI (Variation 9) 15:08 - Finale Mikhail Pletnev, piano Source: Audience Recording -------------- Pletnev’s pages: