Reger performs the rest of the items, small pieces from various collections. The reflective romanticism of the second of his Silhouettessurvives the transition from touch to roll. And the nagging left hand and evocative right give the fifth (a moderato) of his Aus meinem Tagebuch a strongly defined shape. But the eleventh of the set sounds stodgy and deficient, betrayed by the system Reger sought to preserve his intentions. Even the carnal Lisztian energy of the fifth of his Six Intermezzi fails really to register as it should. Nevertheless this disc does preserve something of Reger’s poeticism, albeit highly compromised, and does make one wonder what kind of Regerian tradition could have been established by such as Kwast-Hodapp who died in 1949 and the age of sixty-nine. |