Clara Schumann, Edvard Grieg: Piano Concertos (Signum)
★★★★☆/★★★☆☆
In the early days of long-playing records. a man in a suit at EMI realised that the Grieg and Schumann concertos were half an hour long, in the same key of A minor and would fit on either side of a plate of shellac without requiring fillers. The logic was that Grieg’s splashy audience appeal would offset Schumann’s morose introspection and listeners could flip the record according to mood. Be that as it may, from that day on, the two concertos were as inseparable on record as Cav and Pag were on the opera stage.
This release differs in a significant respect. The Schumann concerto here, also in A minor, is by Clara — albeit partly orchestrated by her fiancé Robert. Clara went on to reshape the concerto that Robert was writing for her. Separating the two of them in the manuscripts is tricky. Clara often supplies the closing line, the cutting edge. As a concert star, she knew how to keep the audience interested.
In Clara’s concerto, Robert’s temperament abounds. What the work lacks is his edgy tension and wacky vision. The Clara Schumann concerto is perfectly listenable, without having an awful lot of originality. The most memorable bit is a piano-cello duet in the middle of the second movement, something I cannot recall in any other concerto. The Romanian pianist Alexandra Dariescu gives a fervent account of Clara’s concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Tianyi Lu.
The Grieg concerto, following on, has less to say and in louder mode. The work has been so overplayed it is dropping out of fashion. Great big rain showers of right-hand notes falling on a dark north sea just don’t do it for me any more. The Philharmonia sleepwalk the accompaniment.
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