Beatrice Rana and Yannick Nézet-Séguin recorded Clara’s and Robert Schumann’s piano concertos last summer in Baden-Baden. The disc, of a touching poetic force, appears Friday at Warner.
Clara Schumann, née Wieck, piano virtuoso and composer, lived at a time when it was not appropriate for a woman to compose music. And among the music that a woman had absolutely no right to compose, orchestral music ranked first.
Clara’s concerto, in there minor like that of Robert, was started in 1833, when she was 14, and created in 1835. When she married Robert in 1840, he had not yet touched the piano and orchestra form. He did so the following year with a fantasy that became the 1er movement of his concerto composed in 1845.
Clara, the younger of her husband by nine years, had then become a housewife. Clara and Robert had eight children, and Clara spent the rest of her life believing that composing was not a woman’s job, a concept instilled by both her father and her husband.
Magic of the pianissimo
Reuniting posthumously, on record, Robert and Clara seemed obvious. However, this has rarely been done, because the recording industry has cultivated the coupling of Robert Schumann’s concerto with another concerto in there minor, that of Grieg.
As incredible as it may seem, only marginal artists (Margarita Höhenrieder with Johannes Wildner, Lucy Parham with Barry Wordsworth, Oleg Marshev with Vladimir Ziva, Shoko Sugitani with Gerard Oskamp and Judith Jauregui with Tomas Grau) had so far defended this intra-family coupling, certainly unbalanced, but necessarily interesting.
When two artists such as Beatrice Rana, former winner of the Concours musical international de Montréal who has become an international star, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin get down to work with one of the most flexible and vibrant chamber orchestras on the planet, the Orchester de chambre d’Europe, they therefore leave with a number of decisive advantages, including an unparalleled instrumental quality, an irresistible verve in the home stretch of Clara’s concerto (for which the best proposal is that of the duo Montero-Shelley with the NAC Orchestra at Analekta), but also poetic evocations that mark their interpretation of Robert’s famous concerto.
There are probably over 200 recordings of Robert Schumann’s concerto. The two things that set this one apart are the width of Beatrice Rana’s touch palette between the tiniest pianissimo and the shade piano as well as the right proportion of the orchestra, which gives a superb relief to the woodwinds and a general freshness to the sound. There is not, here, a “wall of strings” to cross so that the piano dialogues with a clarinet or a flute.
Beatrice Rana uses her finesse of touch not to simper, but to induce deep breathing, oscillating between tenderness and exaltation. We feel it from the first transition of mood of the concerto, around 50 seconds. The Italian pianist plays with the same rigor and the same sensitivity when the young 14-year-old Clara dialogues “gracefully” with a cello in the romance of her concerto, with such an irresistible finale.
All this is splendid and crowned by a sumptuous encore: the transcription by Liszt of the melody Widmung (“Dedication”) by Robert Schumann.