Schumann was a poet at the piano, and the best known of his piano pieces bear programmatic titles such as “Träumerei” (“Reverie”), “Von fremden Ländern und Menschen” (“Of foreign lands and people”) or “Vogel als Prophet” (“The bird as prophet”). His whole oeuvre exudes a sense of poetic freedom, making him the Romantic composer par excellence. Whether in his easiest pieces for children from his Album for the Young or in the more demanding Papillons, we can hear Schumann’s own distinctive voice everywhere – a voice whose many registers can be experienced in this selection, which ranges from the easy to the moderately difficult.
