Some of Robert Schumann’s rarest piano music can be heard in this disc, which ranges from his precocious Titania Overture arrangement to the Ghost Variations, the theme of which, he told his wife Clara, had been sung to him by angels. His Beethoven Studies survive in three sources, whilst his admiration for his contemporaries Schubert and Chopin is shown by two works containing a series of variations. The 1836 Third Sonata is included in the pre-1853 revision and also included is the original version of what became his very popular Toccata, Op. 7.

Demand for piano duet material in the nineteenth century was such that the market expanded to an unparalleled extent. The preparation of an easily playable four-hand piano reduction was of critical importance to a work’s dissemination and Robert Schumann, himself a keen duet performer, wrote for the medium with enthusiasm. He arranged his Symphony No. 2 himself, aided by his wife Clara, expending considerable time and effort on the work. The overtures show the variety of arrangers involved, such as his brother-in-law Woldemar Bargiel and the organist Robert Pfretaschner, both of whom Schumann held in the highest regard.

As keyboards became more powerful during the nineteenth century, so demand for piano duet arrangements increased dramatically. Robert Schumann, already a keen duet player, wrote for the burgeoning market, though largely for the salon and not the concert stage. He almost always supervised the arrangements of his music but the Overture to Hermann and Dorothea is rare in that he arranged it himself. Symphony No. 3 'Rhenish' was arranged by his esteemed colleague and disciple Carl Reinecke, while the Overture to Scenes from Goethe's Faust was the work of his brother-in-law Woldemar Bargiel.

From the early 19th century up until the early 20th the piano was your home entertainment center, before radio and recordings were invented or widely available. This meant that if you wanted to check out Brahms’ new symphony or Verdi’s new opera, either you had to attend a live performance or play it on the piano, usually with friends or family members. This is why most orchestral, choral, operatic, and chamber works were disseminated in the form of four-hand piano arrangements.

As an avid duet player, Robert Schumann not only wrote delightful original pieces in this genre but also supervised four-hand arrangements of his works, although he created relatively few of these himself. At first Otto Dresel’s arrangement of the A major String Quartet Op. 41 No. 3 met with Schumann’s approval; nevertheless, the composer made revisions, adding slower metronome indications to better accommodate the piano’s extended register and sonority. In fact, Schumann listed this arrangement in his catalog of works. Here the Dresel/Schumann A major quartet receives its premiere recording as part of the first of a projected seven-disc survey of Schumann piano duet arrangements by the composer, his friends, and associates.

You can’t help but respect the Eckerle Piano Duo’s meticulously calibrated ensemble values and rhythmic exactitude, although a slightly faster second movement basic tempo might convey the composer’s agitato directive more effectively. Surprisingly, the Piano Quintet’s strong textural contrasts and sense of interplay between musicians loses very little in translation to the piano duet medium, possibly due to Clara Schumann’s intelligent balancing of registers and liberal yet discreet deployment of octave doublings.

By contrast, Theodor Kirchner’s transcription published by C. F. Peters is more conservatively laid out for two players, and consequently is less interesting to hear, although much easier to play. Again, the Eckerle Duo has worked out the balances, tempo relationships, dynamic scaling, and pedaling to an impressively polished degree; you’ll never hear the Scherzo’s ornaments so uniformly and accurately articulated, for example. At the same time, I prefer the shapely exuberance, supple playfulness, and conversational give and take that the Duo d’Accord brings to its Oehms Classics world-premiere recording. Piano-arrangement mavens considering this release may be further tempted by its excellent sound, plus Joachim Draheim’s well-written and informative booklet notes.

-- Jed Distler ClassicsToday.com

Schumann, R.: Album Fur Die Jugend

SCHUMANN Four Marches, Op. 76. Four Fugues, Op. 72. Seven Piano Pieces in the Form of Fughettas, Op. 126. Album for the Young: “Wilder Reiter” (alternative version); Additional Pieces, WoO 16 and 30; Album Leaf: Foreboding • Juan Carlos Rodriguez (pn) • NAXOS 8.573094 (69:05)


Naxos has been issuing Schumann piano discs, including this disc of relatively neglected music, by different pianists. Of the music found here, I had heard only the Fugues before this disc arrived: the fugues and the one march, Op. 76/2, that Richter recorded. There is little competition for this recording: Those collectors who have the complete Schumann piano music by Karl Engel are lucky. I have only half the set, and Engel’s recordings, made in the 1980s, are out of print. This new disc by a solid pianist with wide-ranging experience, fills a gap. It begins with the Four Marches, op. 76, which the very unmartial Schumann wrote in 1849, presumably in sympathy with the rebels of those restless years. According to the notes, Schumann himself dodged the draft by hiding in his house. (That they didn’t find him suggests the lack of imagination of imperial forces.) The marches are of course not meant to be marched to: They each have a central trio that breaks the thumping rhythm. Despite Richter’s preference for the second of these marches, I find the third, with its subtitle “Camp Scenes,” the most charming of these pieces. It begins with a wistful theme, and the trio moves in triplets. Schumann must have meant to give us a break from the aggressive rhythms of the other marches.


The fugues, op. 72 and op. 126, are tributes to Bach. The sprightly second fugue from op. 72 in fact sounds like the master. Perhaps for that reason I prefer such pieces as the first from op. 72, with its spare textures and gentle theme. Rodriguez plays this initial fugue gently, and effectively. There is nothing obscure about Schumann’s publication Album for the Young , except that it turns out he wrote many more such pieces than he initially published. Here, Rodriguez plays 21 such short pieces, which range in length from 18 seconds to two minutes and 40 seconds. He also plays the well-known “Wilder Reiter” in a version with a different ending than we are used to. The additional pieces begin with a bird call: It is subtitled “Cuckoo in Hiding.” It is followed by a playful uptempo piece in which the hands pursue each other. It’s meant to evoke a game of tag. In the midst of these charming program works are tributes to composers Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert. For the Handel tribute, Schumann has simply arranged the theme known as The Harmonious Blacksmith, a piece so well known in the 19th century that Dickens jokingly mentions it in Great Expectations. The disc ends with an Albumblatt, a piece of music whose title Ahnung is translated as “foreboding.” This two-and-a-half-minute piece was only rediscovered in 2007. It is a restless piece played placidly by Rodriguez.


Although it contains no towering masterpieces, this disc with its fine renditions of little-known (at least to me) Schumann should appeal to many listeners.


FANFARE: Michael Ullman

Erwin Schulhoff’s three major works for string quartet fit neatly onto a single, rather short (51 minutes here) CD. They consist of the two numbered works, plus the Five Pieces of 1923, this latter a wonderful dance suite that includes a Viennese waltz, a tarantella, and a “Tango Milonga” in addition to a Serenata and a folksy “Alla Czeca.” This last idiom also features prominently in the First Quartet, where it becomes an Allegro giocoso alla slovacca. You may recognize the melody as the first cousin of the trumpet tune that concludes Kodály’s Háry János Suite (The Entrance of the Emperor and his Court).

This music, rhythmically charged and alternately folk-inflected and harmonically contemporary, is absolutely wonderful, and it’s very well played here by the Aviv Quartet. The group isn’t quite as edgy and hard-driving as the benchmark Petersen Quartett on Capriccio, but their more rounded tone never comes at the expense of Schulhoff’s madcap energy, and they arguably make more out of the First Quartet’s concluding Andante, never mind the Second Quartet’s highly contrasted second movement variations. The group is also quite sensitive to Schulhoff’s use of tone-color–everything from col legno strokes with the back of the bow to the senza vibrato conclusion of the First Quartet’s finale.

Naxos’ engineering is also warm, well-balanced, and natural. If you don’t know this music, you should, and I can recommend this reasonably priced disc with enthusiasm.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

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An overlooked modernist thrills, chills and dances.

"Erwin Schulhoff’s music for string quartet is built on forceful rhythms and startling juxtapositions of material; it dances, yes, but with fiery intensity and rough humor. His style is the polar opposite of works like Tchaikovsky’s First Quartet or Borodin’s Second; in the most famous moments of those quartets, the four players sing together with one voice, melodies flowing naturally along in seamless harmony. Schulhoff’s model is a radically different one: here the interplay between instruments sounds not like a romance but like a brilliantly choreographed action-film fight scene, the players darting and weaving about each other, poised and ready to strike.

The First String Quartet comprises three studies in rhythm followed by an agonized slow movement. The first movement is jaunty and refreshingly melodic, with echoes of Stravinsky in an ebullient mood. The second movement is more menacing, the central section’s thematic material given slithering accompaniment, but it is the slow movement, which serves as the quartet’s finale, that acts as this work’s emotional core.

Of the three works on the disc, the First Quartet was most successful during Schulhoff’s lifetime, and its appeal is immediate. This is an engaging and rewarding piece waiting for a concert-hall revival, and, since it is a scant seventeen minutes, the quartet could safely be squeezed onto many a recital program.

The Five Pieces are a suite of dance movements which seem straightforward: a Viennese waltz, a serenade and a tango are among their number. But these works are not for the faint of heart; they are traditional dances viewed through the prism of Stravinsky or, perhaps, Schoenberg, and, like Ravel’s La Valse but with more of a bite, they are probably meant to some degree to be satirical. The waltz is almost unrecognizable as such in the opening bars, but soon becomes irresistible; the other dances are similarly magnetic. The tarantella is a good example: relatively straightforward in form, the harmonies nevertheless make us feel as if we are in the musical equivalent of a house of mirrors.

The Second String Quartet, composed just a year after the First in 1925, is arguably a masterpiece. The first movement finds Schulhoff’s tense style slightly matured, and the slow theme and variations begin with a beautiful viola solo. The highlight of the variations is an amiable folksy dance beginning at roughly the three-minute mark; another intriguing dance, with the unique marking “Allegro gajo,” follows in the third movement, but the finale is a fierce, very modern battle with some of the most thrilling unison playing on the album.

Fortunately for Schulhoff’s legacy, these are terrific performances. The Aviv Quartet have been playing together for a decade now, since they inaugurated their career amid a flurry of international competition victories in 1999, and they sound simply fantastic on this disc. The playing is electric; no position is a weak link. Schulhoff’s music for string quartet has been assembled on another disc, a 1994 Capriccio release, but this Naxos album is more widely available, and at half the price. Neither represents the complete quartet music (a Divertimento has gone unrecorded), but only completists will really be bothered by this quibble.

A terrific introduction to Schulhoff’s chamber music, then, although there are other works (like the surprising Concertino for Flute, Viola and Double Bass) which are more immediately appealing, and although other albums may simply have more music (this one is barely fifty minutes long). But this recording will be an eye-opener for those who prefer their string quartets to be perfume-soaked romantic treasures, and a treasure for admirers of modern chamber music. A good way to expand one’s horizons."

-- Brian Reinhart, MusicWeb International

Schubert: Trout Quintet / Adagio and Rondo Concertante

SCHUBERT: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 6

SCHUBERT: String Quintet in C major / String Trio in B-Flat

SCHUBERT: String Quartets (Complete), Vol. 3

SCHUBERT: String Quartets (Complete), Vol. 2

SCHUBERT: String Quartets (Complete), Vol. 1

Both of the song cycles recorded here combine lyricism with powerful storytelling, covering a wide range of emotions that are well suited to the beautiful sonorities and vocal nature of the French horn. Schubert’s late ‘Schwanengesang’ conveys its pastoral setting, messages of love, pain of separation, and haunted loss so descriptively that the music is just as effective without words. Brahms arranged his ‘Zigeunerlieder’ or ‘Gypsy Songs’ from vocal quartets, their Hungarian folk-music character lending themselves superbly to further transcription. Tim Thorpe is gaining a reputation as one of the most accomplished horn players of his generation. He has received extensive orchestral experience as principal horn with several amateur and youth orchestras including the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the European Union Youth Orchestra. As an orchestral musician, Thorpe has played principal horn with all the major London orchestras and with other UK orchestras including the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Northern Sinfonia.

Schubert: Piano Works for Four Hands, Vol. 1