No one can say that Florian Uhlig’s journey through Schumann’s piano music isn’t thorough enough. This is the ninth instalment out of a projected 15, in what will be the most complete survey of this hugely important body of keyboard music ever released. Uhlig is including all the different versions of works such as the Davidsbündlertänze, the Symphonic Studies and the F minor Sonata and, similarly, in this latest collection of music composed in 1838, he is including not just the familiar 13 pieces that Schumann published as Kinderszenen, but another nine miniatures composed at the same time but left out of the final set, most of which eventually appeared in collections such as Bunte Blätter Op 99 and Albumblätter Op 124. The Novelletten, though, are a much more substantial achievement – the longest of all Schumann’s solo piano works – and not performed complete as often they deserve to be. Uhlig’s enthusiasm and the rhythmic energy he brings to the music are unmistakable. But he doesn’t always seem temperamentally the ideal Schumann interpreter, maintaining a middle course when performances that push towards the extremes would be more revealing. In some of the Novelletten, that proves a real shortcoming.
