Œuvres pour piano

Description

Discreetly, Stephen Hough adds Schumann's notebooks to his discography. Recently, he closed his album "Into the Night" with Carnaval, and now he dares to tackle Kreisleriana, a whole tale of emotions and wanderings that he pushes into the dark. Under his fingers, the evocations of Hoffmann are adorned with moonlight and nocturnal wind, a phantasmagoria of sounds that he balances with a sovereign sense of form, a major hallmark of his art. The secret to this improbable balance, especially in a cycle as sequential as Kreisleriana, lies in a learned listening to the harmonic language that Schumann was developing at the time. There is something of Bach in the way Stephen Hough makes the polyphonies sing, and what a left hand, which carries the discourse and unifies the whole, giving space to each piece and even to the concluding Schnell und spielend, which takes its time to better highlight its episodes before dissolving. The intensity of the discourse, the full sound of his grand ten-finger playing reminds me of what he used to do in the Davidsbündlertanze in his Virgin album from the late 1980s, which also featured a reading of the Fantasy in C. Here he revisits it, further expanding the breathing of the three movements, taming the fever of the first, carrying the march of the second, and leading far into the ether the melodies from another world of the concluding Langsam, occasionally rediscovering the colors that Wilhelm Kempff distilled there. The orchestral breadth of his playing, the poetic power of his interpretation that makes learned use of the pedal, makes him a major Schumannian of our time, as is immediately shown by an Arabeske without mannerism, with a darkly lyrical quality. The narrative discourse he weaves throughout his Fantasy proclaims that he is ready to take on the three Sonatas, let’s hope.