Expanding my Knowledge of Clara Schumann

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

While I do my best to keep up with new releases, every now and then I feel a need to account for an album from the past that I have recently encountered and deserves attention. This particular case is a release by Naxos of two compositions by Clara Schumann, both involving piano performances by Francesco Nicolosi. The first of these is her Opus 7 piano concerto in A minor in three movements completed in 1835, and the second is her only piano trio, Opus 17 in G minor, published in 1846, which is probably the year in which it was completed. The concerto pre-dates her first encounter with husband-to-be Robert. Ironically, the trio was composed about a year before Robert composed his own first (Opus 63 in D minor) piano trio.

What is important about these selections is the case they make that, while she was comfortable with the prevailing rhetoric of that period, Clara had no trouble bringing her own “voice” to the repertoire. There is definitely no confusing her approaches to composition with those of her husband! Mind you, the “keyboard rhetoric” tends to follow many of the tropes familiar to the first half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is clear (to me at least) that her music would not be confused with that of her better-known contemporaries. Thus, I suspect that most attentive listeners will find both of these selections to be “journeys of discovery” worth taking!