For his second Decca album Nelson Freire turns from Chopin to Schumann, a surprising choice for a pianist more celebrated for fleetness than fantasy or character. And character is at the heart of Schumann’s genius, a quixotic imagination that illustrates as well as any composer Walter Pater’s definition of Romanticism as the ‘addition of strangeness to beauty’. Such strangeness, such a constant interplay between exuberance and introspection are alien to Freire’s detached temperament, and although there are incidental successes I found myself longing for a more glowing ardour, for more voltage and involvement.

True, he takes a delectably light hand to ‘Papillons’ in Carnaval and nicely captures the agitated undertow in ‘Chopin’. But ‘Pause’, for all Freire’s enviable fluency, is neither vivo nor precipitandosi, while ‘Paganini’ remains an etude in widely leaping figuration rather than an evocation of devilry or wizardry. Where is the pattering wit and charm of ‘Reconnaissance’ or the communing ecstasy of ‘Eusebius’? Again, Freire hardly rivets your attention in Papillons, Op 2 where there are too many reminders that rapid reflexes are slim substitutes for deep or affectionate characterisation. In Kinderszenen he misses the sf / piano differentiations in ‘Catch me’ and in ‘Frightening’ there is too little sense of variety both in pace and dynamics.

Things proceed very much on pilot and although all these performances are admirably recorded and agreeably free from exaggeration and caricature, they hardly erase memories of the alert and questing imaginations of pianists such as Alfred Cortot, Géza Anda, Myra Hess or Annie Fisher.