With the symphonies and full-scale concertos already released, Heinz Holliger’s survey of Schumann’s orchestral music is almost complete. The current release rounds up the smaller-scale concertante pieces, most from the final years of Schumann’s creative life. There are three Konzertstücke: two for piano and orchestra, Op 92 and 134; the third, Op 86 for four horns; along with the Fantasy for violin, Op 131. No one would pretend any of these pieces burn with the same creative fire as the music of a decade earlier, but under Holliger’s questing and attentive guidance they demonstrate that the falling off in Schumann’s late works was not as abrupt as sometimes suggested. The work for four horns stands out, if only for the novelty of its scoring, and Holliger’s performance – with a fabulously secure quartet of soloists – luxuriates in the sonorities it generates, while in the two works with piano, the soloist Alexander Lonquich finds moments of poetic beauty in the lyrical interludes. Only the violin Fantasy remains rather amorphous: it is short on memorable ideas, though Patricia Kopatchinskaja typically works hard to bring what there are to life, and Holliger aerates the orchestral textures wherever he can.
