By all accounts it took Robert Schumann just four days to complete his eight-movement suite Kreisleriana. One needs a lifetime, however, to explore every nook and cranny of the work’s elaborate lyric fortresses and mercurial flights of fancy, let alone keep up with its 150-plus recorded versions. Volker Banfield’s entry in a crowded field boasts numerous virtues. His rock-solid technique helps clarify Schumann’s maze-like polyphonic implications, giving full due to sequential bass lines and fleeting inner voices. Only Banfield’s callow, dryly rushed dispatch of No. 7 falls below the pianist’s very high standard. Other recordings, however, offer more individualized realizations of Schumann’s sometimes cloudy intentions: Horowitz’s ravishing cantabiles, Argerich’s orgasmic momentum, Lupu’s port-flavored sonority, Kissin’s feathery abandon, and Kempff’s intimate poetry. (Ashkenazy’s fantastic 1971 Decca version surely deserves CD resurrection).
Banfield’s fleet, winningly contrasted Abegg Variations is an impressive piece of work, without erasing memories of Richter’s delicately shaded live version on Deutsche Grammophon. The Op. 28 Romances are well played, albeit on the prosaic side. Banfield’s shouldn’t be the only Kreisleriana in your larder, but it still satisfies on its own terms.
