Following her highly successful recordings of Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, the Japanese pianist Hideyo Harada presents her third SACD with three key works by Schumann, celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth. In a coherent interpretation, Schumann’s works offer several mysteries and countless possibilities. Harada exhibits a highly personal and carefully considered reading of these romantic works, realising with remarkable plasticity Schumann’s pivotal concerns from a crucial period of his artistic development: the wide, quasi-narrative context including stark contrasts and differentiated, filigree details; the characteristically free flow of tempo and the clear contours of the complex course of his music. Relationships to romantic literature - Kreisleriana - to the classical legacy of spacious musical design - Fantasie in C major - and to abstract visual art - Arabeske - accentuate the open horizon under which Schumann saw his music between 1836 and 1838.
