Robert Schumann, Carnaval, Fantasie, Chi-Chen Wu

Some solo piano works have been so ubiquitous, so often performed, that it takes a pianist with a different vision to shake you out of the near torpor you may experience. Of course there are often enough excellent reasons why a work is so widely played and heard. Still, it takes something special to wake you up. That is the case with pianist Chi-Chen Wu's recent recording of Robert Schumann's Carnaval, Op. 9 and Fantasie, Op. 17 (Musica Omnia 0705). We've encountered Ms. Wu before as the pianist on Schumann's Complete Sonatas for Violin and Piano (see review on these pages for March 1, 2016). She most impressively established her Schumann interpretive credentials on that disk.

Tackling the "Carnaval" and "Fantasia" is something perhaps more of a challenge. So many notable and well-endowed pianists have gone there before. What can be left to say?  They could be played still louder, still faster, or still slower, with still more rubato, all that I suppose. What would be the point? Chi-Chen Wu has all the technical endowment one would expect for a successful rendition of these repertoire staples. Yet the emphasis is not on dazzling the hearer with fireworks.

Instead Ms. Wu gives us a very focused vision of Schumann by getting everything exactly right, and doing so in a most musical manner. There is a requisite passion, yes, but it is harnessed to the harmonic-melodic sequence with perhaps a slightly more Apollonian core than has been standard practice. Not that the renditions are cold, far from it. They are poised, balanced, emotive but precise.

I would venture to say that this disk is an example of Schumann's Schumann. It very much zeroes in on the notes themselves, singingly and surgingly, but never as a kind of spectacle.

It is an example of a more classicistic reading of Romantic piano, perhaps. For that is shows us Chi-Chen Wu the powerful yet centered pianist devoting great care to bringing alive the music. Less so the gesture of its realization. It brings us out of Van Cliburnian-Liberace-esque showmanship, brings us closer to the source.

Bravo! Warmly recommended.