This is one of just a few releases devoted to the Romantic-era virtuoso Adolf von Henselt, known only to scholars until the late 20th century. Hyperion issued a single-disc traversal of Henselt's programmatic Op. 2 and Op. 5 etude sets from Australian pianist
Piers Lane, while the American
Esther Budiardjo adds miscellanous other single pieces, several of them never recorded before, to fill out a 93-minute two-disc set. The centerpieces remain the Douze Etudes caractéristiques, Op. 2, and the Douze Etudes de Salon, Op. 5, and the conventional titles of these sets give an idea of their content despite the detailed titles (French in the former set, German in the latter) of the individual pieces. "C'est la jeunesse qui a des ailes dorées," it is youth that has golden wings, reads the title of Op. 2/7, and some are quite a bit longer than that. The striking thing for many listeners will be how hard it would be to match the titles in a blind test in which you heard only the formulaic content of the music, which reflects the ideas in the title only in the most general terms of mood. It's not worth asking whether Henselt more resembles Schumann or
Chopin, because his music is structurally too simple to resemble either one. Its chief attraction is a high level of virtuosity that belies the "salon" designation of the pieces in the Op. 5 set; Henselt was writing for himself, and this is no doubt music that comes off well in person.
Budiardjo's performances are clean and, especially in the somewhat more personal Poème d'amour at the beginning of disc 2, expressive. On disc it's going to be mainly the province of library collections and specialists who will want to pore over those ambitious titles.