Kreisleriana

[Schenkerian]

I've been enjoying this wonderful work in the last little while. I have been living with spouse in temporary accommodation in a serviced apartment waiting for our home build to be completed. Moved in today, but the last two weeks I've been listening to Kreisleriana on my I-Pad through wi-fi and it has kept me sane. Listened to Lupu, Horowitz and Sokolov. Without a shadow of a doubt Horowitz is streets in front. How did he do it? Injecting all that drama, nuance, romance and tenderness and all at once. OK, so he plays around with the tempo from time to time, but the left hand has a song to sing all by itself.

Sokolov was absolutely boring and Lupu just too fast. I'll include the Sokolov tomorrow, once I've seen that the embedded U-Tube performance from Horowitz worked out.

[Schenkerian]

Here's Radu Lupu's mish-mash of "Kreisleriana". I lost the thread of it pretty quickly and the interest in it even faster: I get it; it's a race between the left and right hand to see which gets there first in the opening section!!

[Schenkerian]

Schiff is a surprise in this work!! This performance was probably recorded in the mid 1980s and he makes a very good account of the Schumann work. This was back in the days when Schiff was less concerned with identity and woke politics and could concentrate solely on music. It's less precious and effete than you find with much of his later performing. I found myself pleasantly surprised by his reading of Kreisleriana: