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Bach a leads off another Divine Art piano recital, this one featuring Jenny Q. Chai. Here Bach is offered along with one 19^th-century work and one from the 20^th. But the emphasis in this case is more strongly on a single work: Chai devotes 36 minutes of the CD’s total of 51 to Schumann’s Kreisleriana. The eight-movement suite, always highly expressive (and central to Schumann’s piano oeuvre) gets a passionate and involving reading here: Chai is very impressive in the way she contrasts the hard-driving passages with the delicate, quietly lyrical ones. This contrast is key not only to Kreisleriana but also to Schumann himself, with the Florestan and Eusebius characters that he believed, together, encompassed his personality.

In fact, a piano work focused on Johannes Kreisler, a brilliant but very mercurial imaginary conductor created by E.T.A. Hoffmann, seems perfect for Schumann – and Chai’s determination to explore the extreme contrasts of mood and approach in the work as a whole, and also within its movements, makes the totality of Kreisleriana come alive with a high level of expressiveness. Immediately before offering the Schumann, Chai plays The Alcotts, the third movement from Ives’ Concord Sonata. The sonata was designed by Ives to contain a significant component of each performer’s thinking: much of it has to be created as well as interpreted when it is played, and in the hands of many players (including Ives himself) it would sound different each time. On this particular CD, at this particular time, Chai makes The Alcotts a simple, genuine, rather straightforward movement expressing warmth, affection and a certain level of delicacy – a very strong contrast indeed to the Schumann heard afterwards. Even before the Ives, though, at the start of the disc, Chai delves into Bach, offering the basic Aria from the Goldberg Variations in a very slow, quiet, stretched-out version that contains far more emotional heft than it would on the harpsichord for which it was written – indeed, far more than a pianist with a focus on some level of historically informed performance would bring to it. Chai seems to see this Bach work as a curtain-raiser to scenes of strongly felt emotion, and while that is a thoroughly un-Bachian view of the music, it is undeniably effective for listeners who find themselves in tune, so to speak, with Chai’s thinking about all these works.