Two early works by Robert Schumann surge with emotional intensity, where lyrical beauty meets dramatic urgency, soaring passion collides with deep introspection. Pianist Ayham Hammour, long associated with Poland and a familiar presence on major stages throughout Europe and the Americas, brings Schumann's inner world vividly to life. With imagination and keen insight, Hammour uncovers not only the composer's profound dramatic voice, but also the sparkle of wit, lightness, and subtle irony that lies beneath the surface.

This album offers an intimate journey into Schumann's world through three emblematic works. At it's heart stands the original 1841 version of the Fourth Symphony, a rarely performed score whose transparency and almost chamber-like clarity reveal a Schumann of striking immediacy, far from the heavier later revision. The Cello Concerto and the Fantasia for violin, the latter performed here in an idiomatic and expressive transcription for cello, both belong to Schumann's final Dusseldorf years and share an atmosphere of shifting moods and luminous shadows. Throughout the album, Alexander Rudin - appearing both as conductor and as solo cellist - joins Musica Viva in shaping a vivid, deeply human portrait of Schumann's imagination and it's fragile, radiant beauty.

Between Fire and Silence is the debut album of the young Danish pianist David Munk-Nielsen, presenting a program that brings together the Romantic worlds of Robert Schumann and Jean Sibelius. Through this combination, the recording explores a rich musical landscape shaped by contrasts between intimacy and passion, reflection and intensity. At the heart of the album are two central piano works by Schumann: Kinderszenen, Op. 15 and the monumental Fantasie, Op. 17. In Kinderszenen, Schumann looks back on childhood through a series of poetic miniatures that capture innocence, nostalgia, and quiet reflection. Pieces such as the famous Traumerei reveal the composer's deeply lyrical voice and his gift for expressing profound emotion within a small musical frame. The Fantasie, Op. 17, composed shortly afterwards, represents the other side of Schumann's artistic personality. Vast in scale and emotional scope, the work is filled with longing, passion, and dramatic power. Written during a period when Schumann was separated from Clara Wieck, the Fantasie became a deeply personal expression of love and yearning. Together, these two works reveal the dual nature often associated with Schumann's artistic identity: the poetic introspection of Eusebius and the fiery intensity of Florestan. Complementing Schumann's music are selected piano pieces by Jean Sibelius from Op. 5 and Op. 24. Although Sibelius is best known for his orchestral works and symphonies, his piano music offers a more intimate perspective on his compositional voice. These miniatures are refined, atmospheric, and rich in subtle color, revealing a quieter but deeply expressive side of the Finnish composer. Placed alongside Schumann's Kinderszenen, Sibelius' piano works create a contemplative counterpart to the dramatic scale of the Fantasie. The program thus unfolds as a dialogue between two composers and two musical worlds, balancing Nordic lyricism with German Romantic intensity. With Between Fire and Silence, David Munk-Nielsen introduces himself as a thoughtful and expressive interpreter, presenting a debut recording that reflects both his artistic roots and his commitment to exploring the storytelling power of Romantic piano music.

Classical Music

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.

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

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.

Goethe' Faust is one of the highest peaks of German Romantic poetry, and fascinated composers across Europe: Berlioz, Liszt and Gounod were just some of the many entranced by it's visionary power.

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.

Classical Music

You know him from cpo’s recordings of his chamber music (the piano trios) and his Prize Symphony. With this release cpo chose a selection from Schumann’s more than 60 arias and lieder with selected piano compositions. Many of his piano works are considered "songs without words" and serve as excellent compliments to this song edition.

Green is the third of the highly praised color series by the award-winning Amaryllis Quartet. White received the ECHO Klassik in 2012.

Classical Music

These wonderful musical leaves, compiled for us by the pianist Tobias Koch for the fourth CD of his Schumann series on GENUIN, waft towards us as if from distant times. Alongside works of Schumann, we find delicate treasures by Johannes Brahms, Theodor Kirchner und Voldemar Bargiel – all works that these composers would have written in Schumann's poetry album, so to speak. Some of them appear on CD for the first time here. And alongside this allurement of rarity, Koch's floating, breathing piano sound fascinates us once again, conjuring up the period of these pieces with their impetuous feelings, salons and yearning for distant places - fragile and moving miniatures...

Classical Music

Classical Music

V 3: PIANO WORKS

Schumann: Fantasie - Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor

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]

Schumann, R.: Cello Concerto, Op. 129 / Fantasiestücke / 5 P

Many works by Camillo Schumann remained unpublished during his lifetime and today are housed in the Saxon State Archive – a fate very different from that of his elder brother Georg Schumann, whose oeuvre has experienced a selective, though continuous renaissance on the recording market during the past decades (e. g., on cpo). And yet Camillo Schumann’s oeuvre covers almost all the musical genres, and more than three hundred works by him have now been documented. The special qualities of Schumann’s compositional capabilities are present in fine fashion everywhere in his sonatas for clarinet and piano: careful, finely balanced architectonic structures with skillfully elaborated transitions between the individual movement sections, attractive dialogues between the voices, congenial use of the resources of the particular instruments, suspenseful intensifications, and neatly proportioned solutions and conclusions. The compositional tradition of Reinecke and Radecke in which Schumann grew up is continued practically without a break into the twentieth century. Along with his fourth sonata, his playful Serenade in F major in five movements for clarinet and piano was his last composition of more than one movement for these instruments. Here too he proves to be a composer who knows what he is doing and knows how to realize his ideas with the greatest technical expertise.

The year 1841 finally marked Robert Schumann’s breakthrough as a composer for orchestra. That year, he created no less than two works: his First Symphony, also known as the “Spring Symphony”, and a piece which he initially planned as a "Symphonic Fantasy" in one movement, and which would later become his Symphony in D Minor. The Spring Symphony was composed in the coldest winter. Full of longing, it is a work that knows only one direction: growing, blossoming, the path to light and new life. The Symphony in D minor seems much more somber and intimate, “a work from the innermost depths of his soul”, as Clara Schumann noted in her diary. However, the audience could not warm up to this bold, impetuous work, and Schumann set it aside. Ten years later, after a major revision, he published it as his 4th Symphony. This album pairs the Spring Symphony with the original version of the Symphony in D minor, the version which friends such as Johannes Brahms preferred over the later edition. Schumann never heard it again in his lifetime, and it was not until 1889 that it was performed in public once more, by the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne under the baton of Franz Wüllner. François-Xavier Roth, the Gürzenich Orchestra’s current chief conductor, also prefers the original version. With its leaner orchestration, it is certainly the more radical one, and thus requires a higher degree of commitment from the orchestra musicians in forming crescendi, melodic phrases, and extended arcs of formal development.

Both works heard on this new recording by the Daniel Quartet are from Robert Schumann’s significant chamber music œuvre. + Remarkably, it was within a single year (1842), at the start of his career, that Schumann composed his three String Quartets, op.41 and the Piano Quintet, op.44; both are now considered pillars of the chamber music repertoire. + The Daniel Quartet is renowned for its performances of chamber music at major venues in the USA and across Europe. + Hungarian pianist Klára Würtz – one of Brilliant Classics’ most prolific and recognized artists – joined them for the Piano Quintet.

This 2 DVD set is a unique and intimate live performance by a chamber ensemble of actors, singers, and instrumentalists, portraying the deep and ultimately tragic love between the composer Robert Schumann (Sting/Simon Keelyside) and his pianist wife Clara.

Robert Schumann wrote some of the greatest works ever written for piano, four hands. Martha Fischer and Bill Lutes turn in beautiful performances of this great music. Martha Fischer is professor of piano at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, where she heads the collaborative piano program. A sought-after accompanist and chamber musician, she has performed throughout the United States and Europe with many internationally recognized singers and instrumentalists. In a review of Fischer's recording with trombonist Mark Hetzler, American Voices II, American Record Guide wrote: "At least half of the credit for these superb readings must go to her, for she is a marvelous pianist, profound interpreter, and expert collaborator." Bill Lutes an independent piano teacher living in Madison. From 2000 to 2011 he was Artist-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin/Madison where he served as vocal coach for the University Opera. As pianist he has performed nationally as soloist and collaborative musician. Mr. Lutes received degrees piano performance from the Universities of Kentucky and Wisconsin-Madison, and the Artist's Diploma from the New England Conservatory of Music.. He has taught piano and masterclasses at the Interlochen Arts Camp and at the Selma Levine School in Washington D.C.

“Schumann soaked into my life not too fast. It might have been the over intertwining of inner voices…it might have been the broad spectrum of his emotions that needed time to mature and grow within myself….. I did not fall in love with him at first sight as I did with Chopin. Processing his music at times felt heavy. It was like a map in which I had to discover the evolvement of my own searching. The inner struggles, the layers of his wandering spirit embedded in his music either subtle or obvious way (with his own marking) brought me deeper into the cave of my own inner world. To understand him and to ultimately empathize with him required integrity and effort. Nevertheless, contrary to this weight, the duality of Florestan and Eusebius and many between them lift off the certain seriousness in my approach to his music. His music evokes the lightness of the existence. Perhaps the distance which enabled him to observe the alter egos within himself is the humor to his music. I learned to love him in time more than any other composers, most firmly, closely and freely to my heart.“ (Klara Min)

Pianist Eugen Indjic Made His First Public Performance at Age Nine, Playing Mozart's D Minor Piano Concerto. Between 1961-71, Invited By Arthur Fiedler, He Appeared Often Each Season with the Boston Pops Orchestra. In 1968, He Met Arthur Rubinstein, Who Called Indjic a World-Class Pianist of Rare Musical and Artistic Perfection. His Discography Includes Works By Chopin, Debussy and Schumann As Well As Works By Stravinsky and Beethoven. He Continues to Play Regularly on the World's Great Stages, and Often Teaches Master Classes in Europe.

Classical Music