When, early in 1847, the Schumanns returned home to Dresden from a concert tour, Robert found himself all fired up with the idea of writing an opera. He chose (surprise! surprise!) a romantic tale of crusades, knights and damsels in distress (with a bit of magic thrown in for good measure). The story centres on […]
Category Archives: Orchestral
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 […]
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 […]
