The hardest thing about performing Schumann's piano cycles isn't playing the notes. Though the notes are often exceedingly difficult -- the combination of virtuosity and sensitivity is as difficult to bring off in its way as Liszt's combination of virtuosity and velocity -- playing them correctly is only one aspect of Schumann's difficulties. And the hardest thing about performing the German Romantic's piano cycles isn't about interpreting the individual pieces in the cycles. Though the individual pieces run the gamut from deeply intimate to overtly passionate and from wildly excited to profoundly dejected, sympathetically interpreting them, too, is only one aspect of Schumann's difficulties. As Eric le Sage recognizes in this two-disc set of four of Schumann's piano cycles, the most difficult thing about performing them is holding all the exceedingly difficult and deeply poetic individual pieces in the cycles together as a single unified work. Le Sage realizes the difficulties involved because he has so clearly triumphed over them. In the most technically challenging movements of the Etudes symphoniques, le Sage plays the notes with gusto, and in the most interpretively demanding movements of Humoreske, he delves below the surface beauty to the soulful poetry beneath. But best of all, le Sage holds these works together. By molding ritardandos between movements, grasping the tempo relationships between movements, and sculpting groups of movements into larger structural units, le Sage forges each cycle into an indissoluble whole greater than the sum of its poetic and virtuosic parts. Recorded in full, clear digital sound by Alpha, the performances on this two-disc set should be heard by anyone who reveres the German Romantic's music.
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