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.) – […]
Category Archives: Piano music
Schumann’s 4th Symphony, as you might guess from the title of this post, has a rather checkered history. It’s one of the composer’s most original works – which might go some way toward explaining the rather chilly reception it got when first performed in 1841. The score languished on Schumann’s work desk for ten years; then, […]
Waldszenen, (Forest Scenes) Op. 82 is one of Schumann’s last piano works. It consists of nine short pieces all with (sometimes enigmatic) titles. This is no ordinary leaf-mold-under-foot, dappled-sunlight sort of forest but a magical one out of the fairy stories of Grimm and Perrault and; while many of the pieces are jolly evocations of […]
Liederjahr = the Year of Song. Two years prior to 1842’s splurge of chamber music, Schumann, with the same monomania/single-mindedness that he was to lavish on the string quartet and piano quartet and quintet, spent most of 1840 writing songs. He managed in that one year to produce a grand total of 138 of them! Amongst […]
1842 was Robert Schumann’s chamber music year. Not only did he complete three string quartets but the year also saw the composition of both a piano quartet (violin, viola, cello, piano) and a piano quintet (string quartet, piano). The Quintet is one of Schumann’s best known and, arguably, finest works; it was composed during September […]
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 […]
No. 1 No. 2 No. 3 These mysterious groups of notes appear between the eighth (Replique) and ninth (Papillons) of Schumann’s Opus 9 collection of 21 piano pieces, Carnaval. If you remember, the Sphinx was famous for her riddles (What is that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?) And […]
