Inspired by the Romantic storyteller E. T. A. Hoffmann’s eccentric alter ego, Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana is a work Hélène Grimaud has known since she was a teenager and has recorded once before – yet, as she says, “you can spend a lifetime with a piece like this and always find something new”. In revisiting it here, she’s paired it with two pieces by Schumann’s protégé, Johannes Brahms, including a set of songs in which Brahms distilled his unrequited love for Schumann’s widow Clara, and for which Grimaud is partnered by sensational young baritone Konstantin Krimmel.

On this release, Hélène performs all water-themed, romantic and contemporary classical pieces by composers such as Liszt, Debussy, Ravel and more, who all shared a fascination for "Water". In addition to these traditional evocations of rivers, lakes, seas, snowflakes, and raindrops, the album also reflects a contemporary perspective on water and the lack thereof.

Hélène Grimaud, who has lived with the early D minor Concerto for decades, has called Brahms’s Op 15 ‘a piece I need to survive’. Indeed, she recorded it with that kind of urgency for Erato back in 1997 with Kurt Sanderling and the Staatskapelle Berlin, her passion making up for the lack in sheer power you’d find in accounts by the likes of Brendel or Pollini.

This surprising program is a joy through and through. It begins with a 1985 work by John Corigliano (Fantasia on an Ostinato) that uses the slow-movement theme from Beethovens Seventh Symphony and then later flies off into wonderfully emotion-filled directions. Next come Beethovens Tempest sonata, played with just the right drama, and his fabulous Choral Fantasy, op. 80, which is part sonata, part study for the 9th symphony. Pianist Grimaud plays the Fantasy with alternating delicacy and power, and the disc ends with Arvo Parts Credo, scored for piano solo, mixed chorus, and orchestra.