Description
To Robert Schumann, the piano represented the alpha and omega of an inner world shaken by psychological storms that drove him to the brink of snapping. At a time when he was crazed with passion for his fiancée Clara, from whom he was forcibly separated, his overflowing inspiration raised the Fantasie in C major op.17 to breathtaking peaks. The ghostly universe inhabited by the figure of the musician Kreisler, invented by the Romantic writer Ernest Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, haunted the mind of a bipolar composer constantly assailed by his demons.
The ‘bizarre, demented music’ of Kreisleriana op.16, dating from the same period, concentrates into eight cyclothymic pieces the nightmarish atmosphere, the bitter chasms and poetic visions, of a fantastic landscape.
Jean-Philippe Collard, seized by an irresistible élan, echoes the cries of the Schumannesque soul. With his inventiveness and his hypersensitive humanity, he opens up infinite horizons from