I found this a difficult disc to assess fairly. For while there is much to admire in Gerhard Oppitz's strong, forthright pianism, I was left with the impression of how much more I might have enjoyed him in the German classics than in an arch-romantic like the young Schumann.
Papillons is as clear-cut in texture as it is incisive in accentuation, which is all to the good in more assertive contexts (like the bold octaves that stride through No. 3). But elsewhere I often missed the grace and charm, the fancy and dancing lightness, surely implicit in the title itself. Nor is Oppitz's unusually slow tempo for No. 7 compatible with its semplice marking.
Moving on to the great C major Fantasie, I thought him most comfortable in the rousing central march, played with great elan. He finds all the necessary turbulence and urgency for the first movement too, though here I missed the intimately speaking eloquence and poetry in his phrasing that puts Pollini (DG) and Perahia (CBS) in a different class. One or two climaxes are over-insistent, with some inevitable loss of tonal beauty and keyboard refinement in general. And can anyone have ever paused longer on the climactic high A flat just before the recapitulation (track 2, 7'45'') than Oppitz's 10 seconds? The finale is plainly deeply felt. But even though adopting Pollini's slower tempo rather than Perahia's slightly swifter flow, he cannot quite match the translucent calm achieved by either of them— perhaps because of a too succulently emphasized melodic line at the start of the movement.
It's in the 13 pieces of Kinderszenen that I felt Oppitz gets closest to the truth. A few curious little surges of tempo and underlinings of detail, together with a concluding poet who sounds no less on the verge of sleep than the child of the penultimate piece, still compel me to recommend Ashkenazy (Decca) and Argerich on DG (whose tone and phrasing have just that little extra touch of magic) as preferable choices. But there's no doubt of Oppitz's genuine sympathy with the composer here. The RCA recording is full and forward, albeit with a touch of metal in the sound above a certain dynamic level.'