Andrea Kauten is a Hungarian-Swiss pianist who, according to Sony's fulsome notes, wishes everyone could be filled with her passion and intensity when she touches a piano. Later we are told of her “precise, highly Romantic (sic) manner of playing, which is rapturous yet controlled”. And so it is doubly disturbing to hear a pianist who cannot leave well alone.

Lacking clarity or perspective, Kauten cannot see the wood for the trees. The booklet-note reminder that she places “great importance on fidelity to the score” is flouted again and again. How can such a chaotic sense of rhythm be equated with the third Romance's marcato assai instruction? Again, in the Fantasie's second movement her stop-go rubato rears its ugly head to suggest a drunken rather than orderly march, and even the second Romance's heart-easing simplicity (for the beloved Clara, “the most beautiful love duet”) comes to us as if through a distorting mirror.

In the sehr langsam of Kreisleriana's fourth section you find her turning ornaments and phrases with a brusque indifference to their poetry and in the eighth section there is scarcely a hint of its mercurial and unsettling nature. Kauten has been well recorded but it is odd to omit the first Romance, and more generally, her over-heated readings hardly compare with transcendental versions of the Fantasie (Richter, Argerich, Pollini, etc) and Kreisleriana (Horowitz, Argerich, Anda, etc).