JUST a short column today, but a deeply personal one.
Later this month, when Robin Ticciati and the SCO perform a cycle of Robert Schumann's four symphonies, the orchestra will be celebrating its 40th birthday. But it will also be addressing a historic issue with regard to Schumann's symphonies. Kids of my generation learned early in their music studies of the "problem" with Schumann's symphonies. Crudely, he was a duff orchestrator, with his symphonic music burdened with laboriously thick textures clouding the musical inspiration and weighing down the momentum and clarity of the music.
This old canard should have been well trashed by now, not least by conductors like Sir Roger Norrington, whose revelatory recordings with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra demolished the cobwebs of prejudice and let the air into Schumann's textures. Regular Herald readers will remember Norrington's visit to the RSNO, during their own Schumann cycle, where the music sprang off the page in an airy manner that Schumann's detractors would have considered unthinkable.
But when I listen to this cycle, my own thoughts will be on a broader perspective. I adore the music of Robert Schumann. I think his music is unique, and have said so over the decades in many reviews of performances and recordings.
There tends to be a strand of thinking which follows a line of Romantic composers through the 19th century. You could begin with Beethoven, who broke the mould, veer left to pick up Hector Berlioz, a total original, then on to Schubert, to Mendelssohn, to Schumann and Brahms, then on to the nationalists and the Russians, and the giants, Strauss and Mahler, then on into the 20th century and its cupboard full of revolutionaries.
All very neat and progressive. But flawed. I don't think Schumann can be lumped into that framework. I think he stands alone, in the profound intimacy of his music, in its occasional playfulness and not least in its duality, a reflection perhaps of his mental instability, but a feature that shapes and characterises his music. He is a man apart.
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