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Christ Church Cathedral
November 12, 2021
Shortly before their wedding in September 1840, Robert Schumann presented Clara Wieck with a volume of songs bound in red velvet and inscribed to "My beloved Clara on the eve of our wedding, from her Robert". Shortly after the marriage, he gave her a cookery book with a dedication to "Meiner Hausfrau" (literally "my housewife") printed on the cover in gold.
It is tempting to suggest that these two gifts encapsulate the reasons that Clara Schumann is today celebrated as a great pianist and teacher rather than the outstanding composer that her extant music suggests she could and indeed should have become. As she herself wrote: "I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?"
Perhaps she should have expected that, but being the main breadwinner in the family and undergoing nine pregnancies (and giving birth to eight children) during the thirteen and a half years the Schumanns lived together made it impossible.
Her husband was clearly aware of the problem: "Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out". Yet clearly not disturbed enough to do anything to ameliorate the situation.
Clara's sole concerto for the piano, composed in her early teens, was a highlight of Friday's concert, and yet the overwhelming emotion I was left with was one of profound sadness, sadness that one who was clearly so talented never got to fulfill her true potential. Indeed, on this showing, I'd venture to suggest that, unburdened by having to support her husband and her ever growing family, she might well have become a more notable composer than he did.
Surely the saying that behind every great man is a great woman was never more apt.
And what of the music itself? While it would be idle to suggest that it is a masterpiece, it certainly holds its own against music composed at the same age by those other teenage wunderkinder Mozart and Mendelssohn. It has been compared to the piano concertos of Chopin and I would say that honours are about even: Chopin's piano part is more immediately individual, but Clara's treatment of the orchestra is, to my ears, far more interesting; and the slow movement, a duo for piano and solo cello, surely had no precedent and may well have influenced Brahms in the slow movement of his own second concerto, also notable for its significant cello solo.
Clearly pianist Elisabeth Pion both believes in and loves this work; playing without a score, she imbued the music with sparkle and depth. I was a little perturbed at what seemed like a certain edge to her tone in louder passages, but I am quite prepared to accept that this was a function of the cathedral's notoriously fickle (I am endeavouring to be generous) acoustic and the location of my seat and I would not want to make too much of this.
That unique slow movement was lovely, a gorgeous duo between Pion's delicate tracery and Brian Yoon's immaculate tone colours. Some of the melodic lines seemed reminiscent of Robert, but that simply raises the question of who influenced whom.
The finale is the earliest music, composed as a standalone piece when Clara was just thirteen, and while lively enough it did tend to go on just a smidgen. But for a thirteen year old? Extraordinary.
In an ideal world we should consider this concerto as a fascinating example of Clara's juvenilia. But alas this is not and never has been an ideal world; we should be grateful, therefore, that the concerto exists at all and that it has been championed by one so fitting to the task as Pion.
The two orchestral serenades of Brahms are relatively early works and also relatively underperformed.
Listening to Gordon Gerrard conduct the second of the two it was difficult to understand this neglect. Perhaps the reasons are other than musical: the orchestra contains no violins and one can imagine both violinists and orchestra managers balking at this, albeit for different reasons.
Yet the music itself is delightful; in terms of tone colours it put me in mind of the "St. Anthony" Variations, composed some years after the serenade, although the latter's orchestration was revised twice, the second time after the composition of the variations.
Gerrard clearly has enormous affection for the music and drew almost chamber-like textures from his players. The winds were especially delicious — indeed, the Victoria Symphony winds have been one of the most notable and reliable features of the orchestra ever since I first heard them some three decades ago — but the strings were also superb.
The fact that there are five movements is just one sign that this music is not a "veiled symphony" (Robert Schumann's description of Brahms's piano sonatas) but rather in the tradition of other serenades by, inter alia, Mozart. I particularly enjoyed the lively scherzo, short, sweet and bouncy. The charming adagio non troppo could have come from the pen of no other; the quasi menuetto (presumably "quasi" because rather too quick for this stately dance) was gentle and comforting, while the rondo finale possessed energy to spare and was, once again, inimitably Brahmsian.
I will confess that I had always been rather too eager myself to dismiss Brahms's serenades as "also rans", but this performance has made me think again.
The twentieth century produced a significant number of innovative and highly individual works for string orchestra; listening to Joyce Morlock's Nostalgia, I would venture to suggest that she is familiar with a fair few of them.
Which is not to say that the music is in any way derivative, even if the violin solo near the beginning did bring to mind Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, however briefly.
But the music had no obvious direct influences and proved highly attractive even if, to my ears, a little too lively for its title.
It was certainly very well played and surprisingly, considering that it was composed this century, proved remarkably popular with those audience members to whom I spoke.
Robert Schumann's concert overture Hermann und Dorothea is another neglected work but, for me, this neglect is entirely understandable.
Based on an epic poem by Goethe the story tells of two lovers in the German town of Mainz, at a time when the villages on the other side of the Rhine were occupied by French revolutionary troops.
The listener is certainly left in no doubt as to the nationality of the occupying army, as Schumann quotes Rouget de Lisle's La Marseillaise near the opening of the work.
Unfortunately, La Marseillaise keeps reappearing and became for me the dominant feature of the music; moreover it sent the piece veering dangerously in the direction of Beethoven's notorious Wellingtons Sieg (aka the "Battle Symphony"), which is territory no self-respecting composer should want to approach — as Sir Thomas Beecham once remarked (admittedly about another work): "Even Beethoven occasionally thumps the tub".
So, despite the smooth almost lush lower strings at the opening, the excellent tempos and commendable overall control, this was the one work on the programme which I would happily have done without.
Overall, though, a splendid evening's entertainment.
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