Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon, as its title might suggest, isn’t a setting of the standard liturgical text of the mass for the dead. The words come from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister and Mignon is the strange young girl whose poem (much set by composers) Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn (Do you know the land where […]
Category Archives: Orchestral
Pablo Casals speaking of the Schumann Cello Concerto: It is one of the finest works one can hear – from beginning to end the music is sublime. This, the first of the great romantic cello concertos, gives us a chance to compare the playing/interpretive skills of an older generation of cellists (Gendron, Piatigorsky, Fournier, etc.) – […]
It would be very unfair to compare the Schumanns’ piano concertos (both in the same key, a minor) with one another. One (Clara’s) is the – albeit brilliant – work of a teenager, while the other is the product of a 35-year-old, mature composer at the height of his powers. What is indisputable, however, is that Clara’s […]
Robert Schumann wrote four symphonies. The last of them, the third (don′t ask! …well, not yet, anyway) was dubbed – not by Schumann – The Rhenish. With the exception of one movement, it’s a rather jolly work and its nickname seems, for once, almost justified [seeming to conjure the great waterway (of course); jolly peasants; […]
If – looking back to last week – Vítězslav Novák isn’t exactly a household name, his two contemporaries, Otakar Ostrčil and Josef Bohuslav Foester, are both most definitely in the same boat as him. All three were part of a generation overshadowed by Janáček and, to a lesser extent, Suk. And yet the Czech Music Information Centre […]
Vítězslav Novák may not exactly be a household name, but –together with another Dvořák pupil, Josef Suk – he was one of the most influential composers and teachers of the generation that followed Smetana and Dvořák. The tone poem In the Tatras is one of his most performed works and does for the Tatras mountains (they’re on […]
Dumka (pl. Dumky): An alternately melancholy and gay piece of music, found chiefly in the work of Slavonic composers. OED There’s something bipolar about the dumka with its instant swings from deep sadness to manic jollity. It’s tempting to say that it’s to do with the Slavic temperament, except for the fact that the Hungarians – who […]
