On track: Schumann would have approved

By WILLIAM DART

Pianist Mikhail Pletnev is a wild card. Carrying off a Tchaikovsky Gold Medal at 21 set him off on a brilliant concert-hall career but, by the early 90s, he was best known as a conductor, heading the Russian National Orchestra that he himself founded.

Few pianists have the virtuosity that seems second nature to this man. In his 2000 Carnegie Hall debut, he offered five encores, the last of which had him hurtling through Balakirev's fiendish Islamey.

Most recently we've heard him, with the RNO, in the Rachmaninov and Prokofiev Third Concertos, a coupling that seemed intent on finding an emotional meeting place between the two works - a rapprochement in which Prokofiev came out the victor.

Pletnev's latest release is a Schumann recital, featuring two major works (the Symphonic Etudes Opus 13 and the Opus 17 Fantasie) along with a selection of shorter pieces.

It's tempting to wallow in the luxuriant sounds that Pletnev and his Deutsche Grammophon engineers treat us to in the opening theme of Opus 13. This is the romantic spirit at its most brooding with a rubato that could either tear the soul or try the patience.

The first variation reaps the benefit of Pletnev's attention to detail as Schumann's many strands and inner themes are allowed to come through the texture. The composer would have approved of the individual character that each Variation is given - the seventh in particular rolls out like a great Bach organ prelude; he might also have been grateful for the way in which the Russian uses a multitude of colourings to disguise what can so easily be irksome, repetitive rhythms.

The Fantasie made Clara Schumann half ill with rapture and Pletnev takes the composer's stipulation that the first movement should be played with real imagination and passion extremely seriously. Any liberties taken - and there are quite a few - are fully justified by the passages of unworldly calm and thundering torrents of sound when climaxes are called for.

The CD signs off simply. Five miniatures from the Bunte Blatter present intimacy without artifice, while the popular Arabeske is given an emotional depth that could have eluded a lesser artist.

* Pletnev Plays Schumann (Deutsche Grammophon 474 813)