At the outset, let me say that Vanguard’s lustrous 24-bit, three dimensional remastering of these 1966 recordings vastly improves upon the toppy, brittle piano sonority I remember from the original LP release. I still harbor mixed feelings about the performances, and of Alfred Brendel’s Schumann in general. To be sure, the pianist’s keen sense of detail and analytical aplomb helps clarify Schumann’s difficult-to-voice polyphony. At the same time, there’s a finicky quality to Brendel’s clipped delivery that robs Schumann’s long lines of their impulsive sweep and feverish lyricism. The obsessive dotted rhythms in the Fantasy’s march-like middle movement, for instance, as well as the notorious skips in the coda, are dispatched with conscientious accuracy at the expense of emotional build. And sometimes Brendel’s rhetorical pointmaking impedes rather than abets the music’s cumulative momentum, as in the finale of the Symphonic Etudes. If you want Brendel in this work, his riper 1991 Philips version incorporates the five posthumous etudes not included here. Neither this C Major Fantasy, nor Brendel’s two Philips remakes, however, truly demonstrate why Schumann regarded this glorious work as being more impassioned than anything he had ever written.
