Heinz Holliger’s lifelong fascination with the music of Robert Schumann finds further expression on the album Aschenmusik, issued to celebrate the Swiss oboist-composer’s 75th birthday (21 May 2014). A new interpretation of Holliger’s Romancendres is framed by Schumann’s own works. Strong performances by Holliger himself and by Anita Leuzinger, solo cellist from the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, and by Austrian pianist Anton Kernjak make this recording another important addition to Heinz Holliger’s ECM discography.

The title Romancendres refers to the lost “Cello Romances” of 1853 which Clara Schumann burned on Brahms’s advice, an act of destruction which outraged Holliger and fuelled the composition of this “music from the ashes” in 2003. However it is not an attempt to reconstruct a lost Schumann composition, but a portrait of Schumann, packed with quotations, projected like a lifetime passing through the mind of a dying man.

Romancendres is prefaced by Schumann’s “Romances” for oboe and piano, masterpieces which have been part of Holliger’s repertoire for 60 years, and by the rarely-played “Studies in Canon Form” which find Holliger on the oboe d’amore. The album closes with Schumann’s Sonata No 1 for violin and piano, with cello substituting for violin. Holliger notes: “Schumann himself thought it could also be played on a cello. I find it grandiose with this combination of instruments.”