Schumann: Fantasie, Kreisleriana, Arabeske

CML call number: CD CLASSICAL Schumann
Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker : "Jonathan Biss … recently appeared in New York, trailing the release of … an all-Schumann disk on the E.M.I. label. … On the program were … Schumann’s 'Kreisleriana.' Biss offered no radical reinterpretations, but at almost any given moment he seemed to be making the right artistic choice. The slow sections of 'Kreisleriana' … magically approximated the sound of one man thinking aloud. … There’s something almost surreal in the sight and sound of a twenty-six-year-old playing with such unerring sophistication. Listening blind, you might take Biss to be an elderly gentleman of Budapest or Prague, one who has a faint childhood memory of what life was like before Hitler and TV. Sometimes I found myself wishing, perversely, that he would do something peculiar or crude, just for the sake of variety. Lang Lang is the kind of performer you really want to hear when he has grown up a bit. … Biss, on the other hand, may someday wish to take a few more risks, to push against the flow of the music that he understands so well. Then again, why would he want to play differently when he is so close to perfection?"