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Classical Clip of the Month Archive: /

Classical Clip of the Month for January 2022
(clickable links in the text are in bold)

  IMG: click picture to buy this CD
click picture to buy this CD


Clara Schumann

Romance: The Piano Music of Clara Schumann

Isata Kanneh-Mason, piano
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Holly Mathieson, conductor
Elena Urioste, violin

   

Clara Schumann was one of the musical giants of the 19th century. A virtuoso child prodigy as a pianist (she did much to establish the norms of a piano recital, including the playing from memory), she was also an original and highly talented composer. This month's clip is from her short, but excellent, Piano Concerto, which displays a seemingly effortless mastery which belies the composer's youth (she completed the third movement when she was thirteen and finished the entire work when she was just shy of her sixteenth birthday). Written, of course, when she was still Clara Wieck, this A minor concerto predates her future-husband's better-known one by several years, and it is quite possible that it at least served as one inspiration for that work, if not as an outright model. (He did, not incidentally, orchestrate the last movement.)

Incidentally, Germany has long held Clara Schumann in the esteem she deserves. Before they joined the EU, Schumann was on the 100 Deutsche Mark: Clara Schumann, that is.

IMG: Clara Schumann


       

Launch date: 21 November 2001.
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