A startling but profoundly revelatory account of Schumann’s great set of variations. Pogorelich plays with exemplary clarity and rhythmic tautness, but the most important feature of his playing is its consistent sense of the fantastic, evinced by tempi that often sound extreme on first blush, but quickly grow on you.
00:00 — Theme, Andante. Grief-stricken, still.
02:01 — Etude 1, Un poco piu vivo. Richly contrapuntal, dynamically lush. The harmonic outline is maintained, but the variation veers sharply away from the theme in character.
03:10 — Etude 2, Marcato il canto. Dark, fantasy-like, with steely melodies in the outer voices.
07:27 — Etude 3, Vivace. A study in the generation of smooth, dolce, staccato sounds.
08:43 — Etude 4. Jagged and stark, rich with canonic motion.
09:37 — Etude 5, Scherzando. The rhythm is as propulsive as ever, but the mood is one of vivacissimo lightness.
10:44 — Etude 6, Agiato. Chordal hijinks, leaps, and frenetic interplay between both hands come together to create a brilliant, bewildering, contrapuntally dense explosion of musical colour — all precise as an atomic clock.
11:34 — Etude 7, Allegro molto. Schumann takes a seemingly naive idea from the second bar of the theme (a repeated G#) and goes to town with it, creating a vigorous, muscular musical gem suffused with unexpected harmonic leaps.
12:47 – Etude 8, Sempre marcatissimo. A true compositional marvel. Canonic/fugal textures merge with dramatic, bitter, French-overture gestures, treacherous leaps, and heartbreaking harmonies. The tempo Pogorelich chooses here allows every voice to be painstakingly singled out, and creates some genuinely transcendent moments.
16:11 – Etude 9, Presto possibile. Rapid fistfuls of chords, played with air and (only apparent) effortlessness, before sudden harplike figuration and a silkily eerily diminished arpeggio bring the variation to a close.
16:48 – Etude 10, Sempre con energia. Pogorelich brings exhilarating physicality to bear on this variation, with a surging, scalar bass line set off against repeated notes in the RH.
18:02 – Etude 11, Andante expressivo. An exquisitely crafted variation, with quintet polyrhythms and stunning counterpoint (often featuring voices which drift very far from each other) sustained over a murmuration of modified Alberti bass. The textural shading which Pogorelich manages to pull off here is pretty incredible.
21:42 – Etude 12, Allegro brillante. Not really a variation on a theme, but a triumphant close with a march-like sense of rhythm and purpose. Measure 50 is pure fanfare: A long pedal tone in A-flat, a middle voice echoing the opening theme, and on top dotted 16ths billowing like sails in the wind. Pulled off by Pogorelich with inimitable swagger.