Robert Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 17; Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6 Herbert du Plessis, piano Recorded June 1995, Boulogne-Billancourt PAVANE ADW 7348 [69:09] — Here’s a pianist; I haven’t encountered before, stepping into repertoire where the ghosts of great interpretations hover rather uncomfortably close.
Du Plessis has craft—that much is clear from the opening measures of the Fantasie. The fingerwork in those cascading runs negotiates Schumann’s dense textures with competence, even a certain fluency. But competence, alas, isn’t enough when you’re dealing with music that demands something closer to possession.
The recording itself doesn’t help. The piano sound is boxy, oddly dimensionless—as if someone placed a decent instrument in a room with all the acoustic warmth of a storage closet. Dynamic range feels compressed, the kind of engineering that makes forte passages sound merely loud rather than impassioned, and the softer moments lack that essential bloom, that sense of the hammer leaving the string and the sound expanding into space.
It’s the sort of recording that makes you wonder whether anyone actually listened back before approving it for release. Du Plessis brings poise to the Fantasie‘s first movement — that extraordinary structure Schumann built as a monument to Clara. The architecture is there, properly proportioned.
But where’s the yearning? Where’s the sense that these notes are being torn from somewhere deep and necessary? He plays the right notes at the right time with appropriate sensitivity—and yet the music remains earthbound.
That famous passage marked “Im Legendenton,” which should float like memory itself, proceeds with cautious literalness. The rubato is timid, the kind that asks permission rather than takes flight. The Davidsbündlertänze fares somewhat better, perhaps because its eighteen miniatures (not nineteen, as some misprints have it) require less sustained intensity.
Du Plessis handles the contrasts between Florestan and Eusebius—Schumann’s wild and contemplative alter egos—with reasonable understanding. The mercurial shifts of mood, the sudden veerings from exuberance to introspection, register clearly enough. But again — there’s that sense of playing about the music rather than from within it.
The ninth piece, that haunting nocturne, should sound like it’s being improvised in the moment, thoughts forming as the fingers move. Here it sounds studied, worked out in advance and carefully reproduced. I keep thinking of Kempff in this repertoire—that combination of intellectual clarity and spontaneous warmth,; the way he could make you hear the compositional logic while never sacrificing emotional immediacy.
Or Brendel’s probing intelligence, finding layers of meaning without ever turning analytical. Even Curzon, in his somewhat more reserved way, brought a quality of inwardness that made you feel you were overhearing something private and profound. Du Plessis doesn’t inhabit that world.
His Schumann is polite, well-mannered, studio-bound in the worst sense. The touch itself lacks variety—that crucial element in Schumann, where the quality of sound production matters as much as the notes themselves. Those strange, obsessive repetitions in the Davidsbündlertänze, those moments where Schumann seems to be circling around an idea he can’t quite grasp—they need a certain wildness of color, a sense that the pianist is discovering something unstable and fascinating.
Du Plessis gives us tasteful uniformity instead. One might argue that there’s virtue in restraint, in respecting the text without imposing excessive personality. Fair enough.
But Schumann’s music isn’t neutral terrain. It demands advocacy, even a kind of recklessness. These pieces emerged from a mind that was simultaneously brilliant and fragile, capable of extraordinary structural innovation and prone to obsessive repetition.
You need to honor both the architecture and the madness. For those building a Schumann library, the choice remains clear: Kempff’s DG recordings from the 1960s, reissued in that exemplary four-disc set, offer the essential combination of wisdom and warmth. Pollini’s recent Davidsbündlertänze, for all its occasionally clinical brilliance, at least engages with the music’s intellectual depths.
Even the release, though not ideal, has more air and resonance than what Pavane provides here. Du Plessis isn’t without merit—there are moments, particularly in some of the quieter Davidsbündler pieces, where his sensitivity shows through. But in this crowded field, with so many great interpretations readily available, there’s simply no compelling reason to choose this release.
Technically adequate, musically undernourished, and poorly recorded to boot—it’s the sort of disc that reminds us — how high the bar sits in this repertoire, and how rare it is to clear it.
