Fantasy - Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin / Kevin Kenner

American pianist Kevin Kenner had his first breakthrough as a youngster at the Warsaw International Piano Competition and continues to be popular there. Here, recording for Poland's Dux label, he offers a nicely constructed recital that explores the key concept of fantasy in Romantic piano music and respects the intimate dimensions for which the central work, Robert Schumann's Fantasiestucke, Op. 12, were intended. Kenner's reading of these intense little pieces by the young Schumann, which build on his dual alter egos of Eusebius and Florestan to embody a whole range of inner states, is not a stage-filling treatment, but is sharply etched and quite absorbing. He bookends the work with Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata, designated by the composer himself as a Sonata quasi una fantasia, Op. 27/2. He never called it "Moonlight," yet pianists are generally reluctant to take him at his word and play it quite freely and introspectively, as Kenner does here. The finale is Chopin's Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49, in which, in Kenner's hands, the word "fantasy" seems almost to have taken on a more formal or at least prescriptive meaning. This is an enjoyable recital that succeeds on several levels. The booklet, which for not entirely clear reasons includes a dense explication of Leonard Meyer's theory of implication and realization in music, is in Polish and English.