Florian Glemser demonstrates a particular and profound understanding of the Schumann works performed on this album. The exhilaration, the depression, the obsession, the madness, the tenderness, the belligerence, the resignation, but above all the love and the beauty are all there, delicately and thoughtfully interwoven into the fabric of the performance. This is a powerful interpretation full of color and hidden depths which carries the lsitener on a journey of fascinating exploration into the psyche of the tortured composer. This is a recording of rare insight.

The three works selected for this recording by pianist Caspar Frantz – Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6, his first great piano cycle; Nachtstücke, op. 23, and Gesänge der Frühe, op. 123 –are quite dissimilar in some ways and yet closely related in others. • Typical of the arch-Romantics, all have as their inspiration a literary source, and all three differently represent Schumann’s early creative burst and his somewhat ill-considered latterly decline. +Mr. Frantz is an internationally recognized concert and recording artist, with two acclaimed previous recordings for the Ars Produktion label.

It was "the great meanings of the ancients" that drove Goethe to Italy and Mendelssohn to Scotland. Literati and musicians are united by a preoccupation with the past, searching for themselves in the foreign and distant. This is more than mere intellectual curiosity; to receive fresh stimuli for one's own work from the ancients is like an act of self-assurance through questioning those masters who form the canon of knowledge and to whom new voices must be gallantly added. By showing personal reverence through artistic references, artists have always created new forms of expression in the footsteps of the past. Bringing such interactions to light is the goal of this album. The collected works show examples of how pioneering this attitude is. It was Mendelssohn who was the impetus for the Bach renaissance in the mid-nineteenth century. It directly affected Clara and Robert Schumann as well as Franz Liszt, whose piano transcriptions of Bach's organ works open the recording. Like many composers, Liszt was drawn to Italy, whose cultural heritage, including Renaissance paintings and poems by Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch, captivated him. Petrarch in particular appealed to Liszt and Schumann. The latter read his poems and translated them; Liszt set them to music. Dante's "Divine Comedy" was also omnipresent. Liszt's resounding Dante reading concludes the series of selected works that push us back, as it were, into the future.

Pianist Alexander Kobrin, born in Russia in 1980 and now based in the U.S. is an internationally acclaimed pianist who, among other honors, is a former winner of the Gold Medal Prize in the heralded Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. + This Centaur release features Mr. Kobrin’s in an all-Schumann program, opening with one of the composer’s finest of several piano masterpieces that comprise Schumann’s first two dozen or so published works, Carnaval, op. 9, followed by Waldszenen, op. 82, which contains the wondrous Vogel als Prophet, and concludes with the op. 18 Arabesque.

From the start, it was literature and poetry which stimulated Schumann. His music is poetic, narrative and descriptive. Schumann preferred small forms, individual pieces that he often compiled into sets like the Intermezzi, Impromptus, Albumbletter and Kinderszenen, as well as the Fantasiestucke presented on this recording.

A beautifully programmed collection anchored by the strength of Ragna Schirmer's piano. Clara and Robert Schumann borrow from each other's compositions in the early years of their great love affair in two sets of playfully intimate variations. Twenty years later, the theme is woven anew into two more sets of variations: a revisiting on the theme by Clara Schumann and one by her friend Johannes Brahms. Performing on an original Blu¨thner grand piano of 1856, Ragna Schirmer's long association with the music of both Clara and Robert deepens the sense of rediscovery of these rarely recorded works for the listener.

By 1845, only two years before his death, Mendelssohn at 36 was an eminent 'establishment' figure—but one whose creative imagination no longer had its first freshness. I entirely agree with the American sleeve-note writer that the Quintet's crowning glory is its slow movement, "an elegaic Adagio in D minor, remarkable especially for the way Mendelssohn uses his small ensemble to suggest deep contrasts of light and shadow". And though the elves and sprites of the Scherzo, marked Andante scherzando, sound a little middle-aged in comparison with their nimbler cousins in the Octet and other earlier marvels, they are certainly not without charm. In the active flanking movements Mendelssohn's motivation seems impersonal, like a return to eighteenth-century delight in superlative craftsmanship per se. Here the Guarneris and Zukerman greatly help the composer with their urgent drive. Some of the tremolo down below emerges just a bit hard in the first movement, but their assualt on the finale's con fuoco counterpoint makes for an exciting finish. They find the grace for the Scherzo, and the expressive intensity for the Adagio.

-- Gramophone [2/1980, reviewing the original LP release of the Mendelssohn Quintet]

The young German baritone Konstantin Krimmel won the prestigious Preis des Deutschen Musikwettbewerbs in 2019, in addition to the Helmut Deutsch Prize. He joins Alpha for a number of recordings, starting with this programme of lieder conceived with his longstanding partner, the pianist Doriana Tchakarova. This lover of words, a particularly expressive performer in concert, wanted to 'tell a story' for his first album: he chose to record a selection of ballads, because 'they are genuine operas in just a few minutes... mini-sagas that permit great interpretative freedom'. Among the great poets present here are Schiller, Goethe and Heinrich Heine. As to the composers, alongside the indispensable Schubert and Schumann, this programme presents a great master of the genre, Carl Loewe, who wrote several hundred ballads: the works recorded here, inspired by Scots poems or Danish legends, are especially eloquent. There is also a chance to discover the much more rarely recorded Adolf Jensen, a great admirer of Wagner, whom he met in 1861: 'To translate Wagner's ideas of Beauty and Truth to smaller forms has been my aim in all my later compositions.'