In his long and scholarly accompanying essay, Andreas Staier pays tribute to Schumann’s debt and devotion to Bach. For Schumann, all musical greatness had its roots in Bach, a composer of “no half measures…and with everything written for eternity”. Staier finds Bach’s influence in both likely and unlikely places and he shows, too, how a delectable, childlike innocence easily blossoms into adult utterance (heartfelt in the mysterious, three-asterisk heading of No 3 or the more cryptic manner of No 7 from Album for the Young). But in Op 32 (a work unforgettably played and recorded by Gilels) you enter another world of the imagination. In the central section of No 3 the melody and countermelody ring out as if across some ghostly chasm, the harmony daringly advanced for its day. The Waldszenen, too, gives us in its enchanted woodland scenes the essential Schumann where the hounds are in full cry (Nos 2 and 8) or where the Prophet Bird seems whimsically to wing its way into the 20th century. And it is here and elsewhere that Staier’s playing is more cautious than fully characterised. Playing most interestingly on an 1837 Erard (Clara Schumann’s preferred instrument) he sounds too comfortably at home in the Kinderszenen’s opening “Foreign Lands”, too indifferent to the Entreating Child’s special plea. There are some notably vigorous exceptions but generally poetry is apt to turn into prose and you will not have to look far for more illuminating performances (Richter and Pires in Waldszenen, Cortot, Argerich and Lupu in Kinderszenen). Still, this a useful recital with its slant on one of Schumann’s deepest preoccupations beneath his outwardly wild and turbulent nature.