Collins’s refreshing pianism makes a welcome return to this Schumann survey The Swiss label Claves has struck gold with Finghin Collins, the Irish pianist who won the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in 1999. Vol 1 was glowingly reviewed in these pages (A/06) and, while Vol 2 was given to another pianist (Cédric Pescia; 3/07), Clave...

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Programmes of Robert and Clara Schumann are becoming increasingly popular these days, and Nurit Stark and Cédric Pescia, Israeli and Swiss respectively, present an imaginative menu that focuses on the years 1851 (Robert) and 1853 (Clara). They launch into Robert’s Second Violin Sonata with great purpose and energy, its tumult well caught without...

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Finghin Collins's first volume in Claves's complete cycle of Schumann's piano music (A/06) may be a hard act to follow but in Cédric Pescia, a young French-Swiss pianist, the label has chosen well. Vivacious, lucid and affectionate, all his performances are unfailingly musical. He plays Album for the Young without a hint of condescension but wit...

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Enescu’s early string Octet (completed 1900) displays a dizzying mixture of qualities – exuberance, busyness, contrapuntal complexity, thematic richness and a sweep that suggests a burgeoning creative talent on a roll. I’m often reminded of the young Korngold save that the teenage Enescu’s more prolix style makes for longer musical sentences and...

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The Swiss-French pianist Cédric Pescia adds two further discs to his previous volume in Claves’s series of Schumann’s complete piano works. And in Vol 5 he admirably blends the familiar and unfamiliar. Yet, if his energy and enthusiasm are almost palpable, there is too little sense of counterbalancing poise, of calm as well as disquiet. True, he...

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The music of György Kurtág, who celebrated his 90th birthday in February, is enjoying a richly deserved if belated groundswell of recordings. It forms the linchpin of CDs by two duo piano teams, Antoine Françoise and Robin Green and the siblings Hans-Peter and Volker Stenzl. Françoise-Green are intelligent and sensitive musicians with a genuine...

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