Is it familiarity that makes us love the greater Schumann so much more than the lesser? Perhaps not, suggests Emil Gilels’s gripping account of the rarely heard Piano Pieces Op 32, characteristic slices of the kind of music Schumann usually liked to assemble into larger, evocatively titled collections. As in Brahms’s early Ballades, Op 10, Gilels’s playing is fluid in its approach to voicing, and extraordinarily lucid in its control of musical ideas. Chopin’s Polonaise in C minor, Op 40 No 2, is nobly done, but the magisterial approach is taken rather further in the opening movement of the same composer’s Sonata in B minor, where the lack of propulsion will not be to all tastes. The BBC recording, made in the chapel of Abbotsholme School in Staffordshire in 1979, is very true to life. url.ie/e6sy