It’s all too easy to take familiar masterpieces for granted. So no experience is more rewarding than a performance that reminds you of the treasure trove the work in question actually is. Perahia’s Kreisleriana is of this kind. Schumann dashed it off at white heat, subsequently admitting to Clara that “a positively wild love is in some of the movements, and your life and mine, and the way you look ... ”. Perahia captures this essential immediacy and urgency while at the same time revealing endless subtleties of craftsmanship – not least in his intimately inflected voicing of inner and under threads. I was constantly enthralled by the eloquence of his left hand in this context. Tempo contrasts between the eight movements – and equally in the unpredictable changes within each one – struck me as perfectly judged, integrating the music into an exceptionally unified whole. Never is there a suspicion of a self-conscious ‘interpreter’ at work. Everything flows with an inevitability suggesting that it could have been done in no other way – that it was exactly what Schumann meant.
After so poetic an introduction to the F sharp minor Sonata, I confess to slight disappointment in the note of impatience in Perahia’s highly-strung urgency in the (here very fast) fast movements, not forgetting the Scherzo with its Philistine-mocking Trio. Even the slow movement surely needs more time for its full wonderment to tell. Despite Perahia’s unflagging rhythmic vitality, it was a recent (more forwardly recorded) version from the young Norwegian, Leif Ove Andsnes that took me closer to the Florestan and Eusebius behind this work. Finely clear, natural sound throughout.'