This is the fourth release by the Cologne-based husband-and-wife piano duo team of Gülru Ensari and Herbert Schuch. As Schuch explains in his booklet note, ‘it would take a lot to explain why we have chosen these particular pieces, why we have chosen precisely this particular sequence’. Their preference, presumably, is that we simply experience the music, perhaps with the added filter of the ninth of Rilke’s 10 Duino Elegies, which is printed in full in the original German.

Most successful of these performances is also the longest: the three selections from Messiaen’s 1943 Visions de l’Amen, which bookend Brahms’s Schumann Variations, the fourth, ‘Amen du désir’ before, and the fifth, ‘Amen des Anges, des Saints, du chant des oiseaux’, and first, ‘Amen de la Création’, following. The harmonic piquancy and rhythmic vitality of these pieces summon from the duo a greater decisiveness of touch than one hears in either the Schubert or Brahms. Each piece creates a distinctive and vivid atmosphere.

Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge also inspires a wider spectrum of touch and dynamic strategies – including attack and release, legato and staccato, and loud and soft – than in Schubert or Brahms, though applied in ways that suggest a rather aggressive hard edge. Cohesion and drive, on the other hand, seem abundant. One comes away with the impression of a stylistic net cast wide yielding a catch of varying quality.