Guitarist Hoppstock Arranges Schumann

Tilman Hoppstock and Jesse Flowers in the YouTube video of their performance of music of Robert Schumann

Some readers may recall this past Friday’s announcement of the release of the next OMNI on-Location video produced by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The program is less than ten minutes in duration, presenting three short works by Robert Schumann taken from two of his collections of piano music. The first two can be found in his Opus 68 Album for the Young. Both of them are in the second part, composed for “more adult players.” These are “Fremder Mann” (foreign man) and the first of two “Winterzeit” (wintertime) compositions. The final selection is “Wie aus der Ferne” (as if from afar), the penultimate movement in the Opus 6 Davidsbündlertänze cycle.

These selections have been transcribed for two guitars by Tilman Hoppstock. He performs them with his fellow guitarist Jesse Flowers. Hoppstock’s selections were well-chosen, enjoyable for their thematic content, instead of compositions conducive to piano sonorities and technique. As a result, the video proposes an alternative approach to Schumann’s thematic content, rather than merely an occasion to play piano music on guitar. The entire video may be brief, but it is long enough to allow the viewer to appreciate the merits of that alternative approach.