Clara Schumann was almost as precocious a composer as she was a pianist; her father Friedrich Wieck ensured she received composition lessons alongside her pianistic training, and among her earliest works was a piano concerto, which she began to write at the age of 13. By then, Robert Schumann was already renting a room in the Wieck household, and helped Clara complete what became the finale of the concerto; she then added the two much shorter movements that precede it, and gave the first performance at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1835.
It’s a muscular work, propelled by athletic themes and clearly indebted to Mendelssohn and perhaps Weber too, and with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under Holly Mathieson, it makes a bold start to Isata Kanneh-Mason’s disc devoted to Clara Schumann’s music as a bicentenary tribute. Alongside the concerto she includes a selection of the solo piano pieces – the three Romances Op 11, the C minor Scherzo Op 14 and a rather uneven piano sonata in G minor that was composed in the early 1840s, but which remained unpublished until the 1990s. And with violinist Elena Urioste there’s also the last original work that Clara wrote, the three Romances for violin and piano, which date from 1853, and which she performed with Joseph Joachim; in the 40 years of her life after Robert’s death in 1856, she composed almost nothing at all.
Kanneh-Mason’s boldly assertive playing makes an excellent case for all of this music, in which the influence of Robert Schumann seems much less significant in the piano writing than that of Chopin particularly. But she does include Clara’s touching piano transcriptions of two of her husband’s greatest songs, Mondnacht from the Op 39 Liederkreis, and Widmung from Myrthen Op 25, eloquently unfussy arrangements which never obscure their intrinsic beauty.
Also out this week
“Fr Dr Clara Schumann” is the dedicatee of Andanken an Robert Schumann (Memories of Robert Schumann), which opens Simon Callaghan’s disc of piano works by Jean Louis Nicodé. Born in Prussia in 1853, Nicodé was at one time identified alongside Richard Strauss as one of the composers who might lead German music into the 20th century, but he is almost forgotten today. If his Schumann tribute stays just too close to the world of Carnaval and Davidsbündlertänze, the other two works on Callaghan’s adroitly played disc give a better sense of Nicodé’s personal voice – his Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme and the 10 pieces that make up Ein Liebesleben, in which Chopin and Mendelssohn, as well as Anton Rubinstein (to whom the variations are dedicated) are added to the stylistic mix.
