Bobby Mitchell’s Robert Schumann Program

Last night in the Old First Presbyterian Church, the 2022 San Francisco International Piano Festival presented the last of the three Old First Concerts recitals to be performed at that venue. The recitalist was Bobby Mitchell; and, unless I am mistaken, he was one of the “founding fathers” of the Festival when it was launched in 2017, having formerly been a founder of the preceding New Piano Collective. Mitchell has had a long standing affinity for the music of Robert Schumann, and last night’s program was structured around early and late Schumann compositions.

The most familiar work on the program was probably the final one, the Opus 82 collection of short piano pieces entitled Waldszenen. These pieces are too short to be viewed as episodes; but Schumann provided each with a title, suggesting that the sequence involved venturing into a forest for an encounter with nature and people (hunters and an innkeeper), concluding with a “farewell” movement. Mitchell announced the title of each episode before playing it, thus serving as the “guide” for this exploration of the woods. Schumann completed this set in 1849, around the time that he was beginning to cope with the onset of both physical and mental illness; but Mitchell’s account abounded with healthy optimism, serving as an excellent conclusion to his all-Schumann program. (He did not announce the title of his brief encore, probably taken from another collection of short pieces.)

The program began with the last piano composition assigned an opus number, the Opus 133 five-movement “Gesänge der Frühe” (songs of the morning). It was composed five months prior to Schumann’s attempted suicide and confinement to a mental institution. All of the movements are organized around the pitches of a D major triad; and only one of them is in a minor key (F-sharp minor). Nevertheless, the major mode prevails, almost as if a rhetoric of optimism could turn back the dark clouds forming in Schumann’s troubled mind.

These two compositions served to frame two much earlier compositions: the Opus 4 collection of six intermezzi and the Opus 5 set of nine impromptus all based on a theme by (then) Clara Wieck. These were both composed during Schumann’s earliest encounters with Clara, and his compositions at that time allowed him to express his enthusiasm. This was also the period in his life when he composed his finger-busting toccata in C major (Opus 8). That composition tends to receive much more attention; and I suspect that, even for those that claim to know the Schumann catalog well, Mitchell’s program may have provided “first contact” experiences.

Taken as a whole, the framing of early compositions with later ones constituted an engaging listening experience, made all the more engaging by the learned attention that Mitchell brings to his interpretations of the Schumann catalog.