Cynthia Raim is Curtis graduate who studied with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. She sports a big technique on the Yamaha CF111S for the labyrinthine intimacies that comprise the Schumann oeuvre, especially those composed while Schumann courted Clara Wieck through musical anagrams and arcane rhetorical gestures. I must note, up front, that the engineering of the piano (E. Alan Silver) is exemplary, the sonic register for Fabel from the Op. 12 is the most pearly I have encountered in many auditions. The 1839 Fantasy swirls and heaves with emotions, the broadly-taken first movement’s exploiting a form of the so-called “Tristan chord” traceable to Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte song-cycle. The mercurial alchemy of the movement breaks of into a declamatory “legend” section then a scherzetto rife with stretti and wistful remembrance. Raim balances her color palette with tender, loving care, the patterns of three-note figures dripping with impetuosity and lilting poetry. The second movement combines a march and syncopated song, Florestan musing on his emotional victories, including a florid trill of the first order. The last movement’s natural adagio echoes Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for steadiness of pulse and ecstatic sentiment.
We move from static serenity to the throes of the fantastico Kreisler, by way of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the 1838 series of eight free fantasias named Kreisleriana. The model for the wild and eccentric excursions into imaginative fancy may well be Paganini, since the piano writing often approaches the violin’s bariolage technique. Alternately musing and bold, the pieces allow Raim to wander beyond technique into the realms of sinuous rills and dark romantic chasms suggested in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. The three-hand effects Schumann perpetually requires daunt Raim not at all, though the polyphony is always more poetic than academic. The last of the set, quick and playful, intimates a canter we find in Kinderszenen, the piano’s tone ringing a carillon meant to be Robert and Clara’s wedding bells.
Raim’s version of the 1829 suite Papillons, after the Larventanz of Jean-Paul Richter’s novel Flegeljahre (Years of Indiscretion), communicates a lyrical, perky naivete thoroughly consonant with its ingenuous, contrapuntal aims. A sly wit permeates Raim’s rendition as well, as breezy charm without which the music could not survive. Always in Schumann we have that sense of “nostalgia for the dream” which gives his affect its otherworldly, mystical invocation to the child in us all. The tender opening of Des Abends from the character-suite Fantasiestuecke, Op. 12 (1837-38) announces the intimately poetic invention of the set. While perhaps less haunted than the classic rendition by Benno Moiseiwitsch, Raim’s beautifully graduated chords compete with those by Argerich and the still-unreissued LP inscription by Ania Dorfmann. Plenty of urgency for the energetic pieces, like Aufschwung, Traumes-Wirren, and Grillen, with its declamatory, martial air. In Der Nacht commands its own aura, a moment of the feverish spasm of Romantic Agony that haunted the age of Byron and his poetic ilk. Ende vom Lied staunchly surveys all that has passed and hints at maerchen–fanciful marches–to come, both from this fertile composer and from his devoted coterie of two-fold personalities.
That Connoisseur presents Raim’s grandly-conceived performance of the 1838 B-flat Humoreske as one band on the CD indicates the pianist’s synoptic view of this arched, six-section view of the Four Temperaments. Syncopes and repeated notes, swirling filigree and disturbed left-hand ostinati prove seamless exercises for Raim, who manages to tie the diversely skittish, often cascading sections of this knotty piece together with a lithe, light hand. Dreamy, winsome, even more melancholy than cheerful, this music finds in Raim an initiate and devotee, another of the chosen crusaders against philistinism and spiritual anemia that often beset the best of times, the worst of times.
— Gary Lemco
