After three exceptional discs of Alkan for Piano Classics, Vincenzo Maltempo has been given the chance to show that he is much more than one-trick virtuoso pony with this Schumann collection. Only one of the works here, the Humoreske Op 20, is heard at all often in recitals, while the F minor Sonata, sometimes called Concerto Without Orchestra, is by some distance the least-often performed of Schumann’s three sonatas.
It’s certainly a problematic piece. Schumann completed the first version of it in 1836, the year in which he was barred from communicating with his future wife, Clara, by her father; then it was a work in five movements, with two scherzos surrounding the central set of variations on a theme by Clara herself. Almost immediately, though, he revised that scheme, dropping both the scherzos, shortening the variations and rewriting the finale before it was published the same year. Seventeen years later it was republished as a revised four-movement work, with one of the scherzos restored. That version was never performed publicly in Schumann’s lifetime, but Brahms heard Clara play it when he visited the Schumanns in 1853.
It’s the final four-movement version that Maltempo plays here. Though he’s on top of every one of the work’s considerable technical challenges, he never attempts to disguise its unevenness, nor to underplay the passion driving it. That passion, in the first movement especially, sometimes bursts through the surface of the music and makes it seem almost inarticulate. The piece settles down as it goes on: the finale, after all, was written a bit later, and Maltempo makes that a dazzling tour de force, unstoppable in its energy. The rest of the disc gives him the opportunity to show what he can do with the more directly poetic Schumann. There are intimate, delicately coloured accounts of the Three Romanzen, Op 28, and a beautifully airy one of the Humoreske, tender and stormy by turn; it’s clear in every phrase here that Maltempo is much, much more than just an Alkan specialist.
