This well-chosen Schumann recital by 29-year-old Siberian pianist Sergey Tanin includes the Davidsbündlertänze, Toccata, Arabeske and Faschingsschwank aus Wien. The presentation and recorded sound from Prospero are excellent and Tanin’s performances throughout are sensitive, honest, idiomatic and devoid of distracting eccentricities. To suggest that Tanin’s interpretations here are routine and straightforward, however, would be to do him a disservice as there is much to admire in his stylish, sincere and unfussy approach to Schumann – and yet I wouldn’t consider any of his versions to be definitive.

A cursory look on my shelves quickly found 14 Davidsbündlertänzes and 12 Faschingsschwanks, and I stopped counting at 18 recordings of the Arabeske and Toccata respectively. With so many additional versions available online, comparisons are inevitable. In the Davidsbündlertänze, for example, Tanin doesn’t capture the poetic capriciousness, myriad quicksilver shifts of mood and colour (or the wrong notes!) as Cortot does in his classic 1934 recording; nor does he have the authority of Arrau’s 1971 version, or the intellectual grasp of Schiff. Equally, in Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Tanin doesn’t match the pianistic fireworks of Michelangeli’s legendary 1957 Royal Festival Hall account; nor does he rival the sheer excitement that Barere, Lhevinne, Argerich, Cziffra, Lugansky and others generate in their recordings of the Toccata. All that said, if you want to hear an hour of well-played and beautifully engineered Schumann, you could do much worse than to listen to this recital by Sergey Tanin and I don’t think you would be disappointed.

Schumann Arabeske, Op 18. Davidsbündlertänze, Op 6. Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Op 26. Toccata, Op 7

Sergey Tanin pf

Prospero PROSP0092

This review originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today