Oboist, conductor and composer Heinz Holliger has long been fascinated by Schumann's life and music. He first recorded Schumann's works for oboe and piano in the 1980s for Philips, with Alfred Brendel as his accompanist, and last year began a cycle of the orchestral music with Cologne's WDR Symphony Orchestra. His own Romancendres, which reimagines the late cycle of cello and piano Romances composed in 1853, a few months before Schumann was committed to a mental asylum, and which Clara Schumann destroyed just before her own death, has appeared on an ECM disc before, in the context of Holliger's own music. Here, with different performers, Anita Leuzinger and Anton Kernjak, it forms the centrepiece of a rather curious Schumann sequence. There's an arrangement for oboe d'amore, cello and piano of the Six Pieces for Pedal Piano, another for oboe d'amore of the intermezzo Schumann contributed to the collective FAE Sonata, and the cello version of the Violin Sonata, together with a new recording of the oboe Romances, more expressively expansive than Holliger's previous version, but as subtle and meticulously shaded as ever.