Robert Schumann, Heinz Holliger, Anita Leuzinger, Anton Kernjak

Aschenmusik places Heinz Holliger's Romancendres for cello and piano at the centre of a programme of chamber music by Robert Schumann. The title means music from ashes. It refers to the Cello Romances Schumann wrote in 1853, shortly before he entered the asylum at Endenich, which Clara Schumann later burned on Brahms's advice. That act outraged Holliger and led to Romancendres in 2003. The album appeared for his 75th birthday in May 2014 and is dedicated to the memory of his wife, the harpist Ursula Holliger.

Holliger plays oboe and oboe d'amore. His partners are Anita Leuzinger, solo cellist of the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, and the Austrian pianist Anton Kernjak. The sessions took place in July 2012 and November 2013 at the Radio Studio Zürich, in a co-production between ECM and SRF2 Kultur, with Andreas Werner as engineer. The booklet prints a conversation between Holliger and Claus Spahn. An earlier ECM recording of Romancendres, by Christoph Richter and Dénes Várjon, had appeared in 2009.

Romancendres is a portrait of Schumann full of quotations, imagined as a life passing through the mind of a dying man. Its six movements run from Kondukt I to Kondukt II. In the second, Aurora (Nachts), the piano is struck and plucked while the cello climbs into fragile high lines, and R(asche)S Flügelschlagen moves between music and noise. Before it come Schumann's Six Pieces in Canon Form op. 56, written for pedal piano and heard in Theodor Kirchner's arrangement with oboe d'amore. The Three Romances op. 94 for oboe and piano have been in Holliger's repertoire for sixty years. The disc closes with the Violin Sonata No. 1 op. 105, played on cello. "Schumann himself thought it could also be played on a cello," Holliger says.

In Gramophone, Fabrice Fitch found it difficult to over-praise the project, calling it "a tour de force of imaginative programming". Helen Wallace wrote in BBC Music Magazine that Holliger's "six masterly miniatures do, indeed, feel like flickering spectres conjured in Schumann's desperate mind". She also singled out the Intermezzo from the FAE Sonata, played here on oboe d'amore.

CD edition of ECM New Series 2395, first released on 23 May 2014.