The C major Fantasie continues to exert its fascination upon pianists and pianophiles, and here come two new recordings of this sonata in all but name (‘fantasia quasi una sonata’, quips András Schiff, riffing on the work’s Beethovenian genesis). Schiff’s recording is especially fascinating as he performs an earlier version of the work’s closing bars, which Schumann crossed out and replaced with the ‘traditional’ ending (the booklet contains a facsimile of the page in question). Back comes the quote from An die ferne Geliebte first heard at the close of the first movement – as much a tribute to Clara, who at that time was the distant beloved, as to Beethoven – bringing the work full circle. It’s certainly an intriguing discovery, occasioned by a conversation between Schiff and Charles Rosen, who told the pianist of the manuscript’s existence in the Széchényi Library in Budapest, where it had supposedly been brought by its dedicatee, Liszt. (In case you hanker for normality, Schiff also includes the published version as an appendix.)

I have to own up to an occasional agnosticism concerning Schiff’s pianism, which to these ears sometimes crosses too willingly from idiosyncrasy to mannerism, even betraying a touch of feyness. (And Papillons and Kinderszenen, essayed here, are hardly among Schumann’s butchest works.) Schumann seems to bring out the best in Schiff, though, and it’s a pleasure to report that he plays everything here with real authority. The Fantasie may be the big draw, although the two-disc set’s title is ‘Geistervariationen’, after the late variations on a hymn-like theme the ailing Schumann claimed he had transcribed from the song of an angel (but note its similarity to the slow movement of the Violin Concerto). It was, in fact, while engaged in the composition of the variations that he made his suicide bid by throwing himself into the Rhine. He finished the work – his last for piano – the following day and inscribed it to the wife he was not to see again until shortly before his death two years later.

Sergei Edelmann offers a less wide-ranging although more bravura programme, coupling the Fantasie with the Etudes symphoniques and, as a palate-cleanser, the lovely Arabeske. He is apt to respond a little self-consciously to the mood-swings of the Fantasie, blustering through the first movement, although his reading of the finale is touchingly rapt. Nevertheless, the episodic cast of the Etudes suits him better and he turns in a persuasive performance of this encyclopedic work.