“Havlat doesn’t try to shoehorn these unusual passages into traditional modes of interpreting Schumann. The top line rarely sings out, for example. That things seem blurred, with multiple lines battling for space, is to Havlat’s credit. Finnissy’s closing music is unsettling and suspended, like a marionette suddenly paralyzed. Havlat’s most emotionally insightful playing occurs here. The close, gentle variation marked “Con Tenerezza” (with tenderness) begins like a torch song, travels through rhapsodic yearning, drifts into a disembodied register and arrives at something angrier by “Trope (c),” all in under three minutes. Havlat navigates these swift transitions smoothly, with an acute sense of line. He connects his disparate materials by drawing out all of their moodiest, most subdued hues… Ideas around variation, whether written or conceptual, tie Havlat’s album together. Finnissy, the great transcriber, finds a kindred spirit in the composer Cassandra Miller, sharing credits on the piece ‘Sinner, Don’t Let This Harvest Pass.’… [an] ambitious corralling of voices ancient, modern, recorded and imaginary, to explore questions but never definitively answer them.”