In the middle of ‘Der Dichter spricht’, the final movement of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, there is a passage of instrumental recitative notated in small notes and without barlines. This passage appears to represent the awakening of poetic ‘speech’ in the imagined child. It is elaborated over dissonant harmonies, makes large melodic leaps, and rises to a much higher register than the rest of the piece. As a cadenza of sorts, this passage has the aura of improvisation. It seems to arise spontaneously out of the lyric repose that precedes it and follows it. And like many cadenzas, one could imagine it sounding differently without altering the basic effect. For pianist Michael Gees, who is committed to freely inventing upon and within classic works, it is an invitation to improvise further. He plays most of Schumann’s cadenza note for note, but then extends it to two or three times the original length, keeping the same basic mood, before resuming with Schumann’s score and playing it verbatim to the end.

This, in a nutshell, is Gees’s approach to getting ‘beyond Schumann’. A good part of this double-CD, maybe 75 per cent of it, is played straight from Schumann’s score. Gees usually interjects his own music at the repetition of a binary strain, or between discrete sections of these highly sectional pieces. For the most part we hear Schumann’s music first, and Gees’s ‘commentary’ second. And this is in line with Gees’s philosophical priorities. In a thoughtful essay printed in the liner notes, he declares that he has ‘never once simply played a composition without living its essence, exploring its ideas and going through its path of development’ (p. 11). The project, in other words, is all about it – the composition. His elaborations take their legitimacy from the way they proceed from it. The primacy of the composition as the source of all that is interesting or valuable is reaffirmed as strongly as ever. Indeed, inventing new music around Schumann’s piece becomes a way of accessing a rich presence that was lost when it was committed to paper: ‘Why not immerse the works once more into the tide of evolution that was once their source?’ (p. 11).

Such an ambition to return to origins, to get back to the real source, makes Gees sound remarkably similar to those historical performance buffs he takes to task for obsessing over ‘the length or positions of crescendo hairpins’ (p. 8). Studies of the latter kind do not put overweening faith in the symbols of the score, as Gees seems to imply. On the contrary, they posit a truth or intention that lies behind the notation, and that is far more important than any notation. And they chase that intention like a Rosetta Stone. Gees’s perspective is not fundamentally different. For him, the letter of Schumann’s scores is only one instantiation – an imperfect, incomplete one – of the infinite potential of works, and he wants us to get behind the graphic symbols: ‘isn’t it a matter of discovering something that lives in the notes as we look at them, something that inflames our imagination?’ (p. 9, emphasis added). The only path away from the notes, in this view, is through the notes themselves. Gees cannot articulate any starting point for invention that does not presuppose the existence of works and their representation in a score. He knows the performer brings something important to the table, but has no language for describing what it is.

I dwell on this point not only because it compromises Gees’s emancipatory message, but also because much of the newly invented music on these recordings does not always sound as if it flows from a Schumannian fountain. At times, such as variation 5 of the Sinfonische Etüden, or ‘Fast zu ernst’ from Kinderszenen, or movement 7 of Kreisleriana, the new music does integrate with Schumann’s original. But more often Gees’s interpolations evoke idioms from distinctly later periods. The music veers off from Schumann’s score into the late-Romantic style of Rachmaninoff, or into edgy tonal modernism, when not into impressionism, jazz, or even pop and new-age piano styles. This stylistic eclecticism is overt. Historical purists looking for musical extrapolations calibrated to Schumann’s stylistic idiom or to his period will be disappointed. They may experience shock at the final chord of Kreisleriana no. 3, a fortissimo G-minor triad with an F♯ and A in the upper two voices, or possibly outrage during the finale of the Sinfonische Etüden. The ideal listeners will be those who, weary of hearing yet another score-based interpretation, want to hear Schumann’s works in a different framework and are eager for transgressive novelty – listeners who can open themselves to the surprise of not knowing where the departures will take place or how they will sound, and who are not bothered by stylistic inconsistency.

Gees’s strategies of elaboration are diverse, especially in the Kinderszenen where the brevity of Schumann’s pieces demands swift intervention. Here Gees inserts or recomposes introductions and postludes, freely extends or cuts passages, and recasts rhythms in a relatively whimsical spirit. But as in the other suites, the most common strategy is to let Schumann’s original be heard first and then vary the reprise or insert a digression at the end. The other clear tendency is to invent on Schumann’s slow, lyric movements rather than on the fast and impassioned ones. Gees is most comfortable when ruminating in three or four voices at slow tempo. The results are exceptionally interesting in ‘Der Vogel als Prophet’, presented here independently of the Waldszenen suite. Just before the reprise of the A section, he elaborates a long, polyphonic exploration of the half-step intervals that give Schumann’s piece its distinctive character. This interpolation goes on for 5 minutes in a restless, dissonant idiom reminiscent of Scriabin. The tone is quite out of sync with the rapt contemplation and pious religiosity of Schumann’s original, but it sustains interest and has an impressive internal consistency for something that appears to be at least partially improvised.Footnote ¹ The attempts to vary Schumann’s fast and rhythmically energetic movements sound comparatively forced. Gees’s takes on ‘Wichtige Begenheit’ from Kinderszenen and on the final movement of Kreisleriana, for example, impose strangely irregular rhythms whose intended effect I could not divine.

Although some of the newly invented music sounds improvised, Gees never claims in the introductory essay that he is actually improvising. This is surprising considering that he has often emphasized his native inclination to improvise in interviews, and has documented it on his earlier disc ImproviSatie.Footnote ² Perhaps Gees, who is also a composer, worked out a majority of his extensions in advance and did not feel right calling them ‘improvisations’. Whatever the motive, his reticence about improvisation in this project aligns with his intention to keep Schumann’s masterpieces front and centre, and to avoid the impression that he might be inventing from impulses not traceable to the composer or the work. To my ears, the most satisfying single movement is the one where Gees’s vision stays in the foreground from beginning to end: ‘Träumerei’. Extensive rubato and enriched inner voices make it a somewhat murky performance, but because Schumann’s original is never heard in its ‘straight’ form, the performance achieves a parity between pianist and composer that is missing from most of the other tracks. Schumann’s original is audibly in there, but Gees absorbs and transforms it with a free, fluid statement all his own.

Michael Gees is best known internationally as the accompanist of tenor Christoph Prégardien, and like many accompanists he has a refined sense of rhythmic and tonal nuance. He is however a heavy pedaller and sometimes lacks the variety of attack and articulation that makes for the most eloquent Schumann. The opening of Kreisleriana, for example, is notated laboriously to ensure the pianist accentuates and breaks up the semiquavers, but Gees (in ‘straight’ mode here) plays them in a perfect even stream over full pedal, negating the sprightly fantastical tone Schumann seems to be trying to convey.

But there I go, invoking the score again! Can’t we escape its tyranny? Gees is one of the few pianists who shows us, concretely, that we can. His philosophical introduction however, in which he offers his understanding of what he has done, shows just how powerful the work’s sway still is. Getting ‘beyond Schumann’ should not be an effort. We are already, constitutively, beyond him. Gees’s forays into late nineteenth- and twentieth-century styles prove it. His ears and creative impulses have been shaped by history since Schumann, and it is to his credit that he opens himself freely to those impulses. There is no need to pretend, then, that what he plays comes from the ‘tide of evolution’ that gave rise to Schumann’s works. For what remains when we get beyond Schumann should be nothing to fear: ourselves.