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 Schuman-ism 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 internal structures, pianistic textures that are never anything but original. The result is a collection of unbridled fierceness (all of the pieces, with one exception, are marked with performance instructions beginning with either “Very” or “Extremely”) and moving lyricism, and one of the real high points of miniature-set writing in all of classical music. Slåttebrekk’s performance represents playing of a high-voltage, live-wire sort (see the Noch schneller at 16:15 and so on). The fast movements ar