IMOGEN Cooper is a distinguished interpreter of Robert Schumann's piano works.
In this second volume on Chandos devoted to his music, the pearly beauty and roundness of Cooper's tone are exquisitely matched by her intellectual command over Schumann's always mercurial and frequently volatile eruptions of kaleidoscopic mood swings throughout Humoreske where, in the blink of an eye, the emotional landscape switches from playful to dreamily poetic. And her mastery of Schumann's divided personality in relation to the elusive structure (the glue) in the great opus 11 Sonata results, quite simply, in the most coherent account I think I've ever heard of this sometimes unstable masterpiece. But one of the greatest delights in this marvellous collection is that Cooper brings together two Romanze written by Robert (the dreamiest of his murmuring love songs) and by the teenage Clara (more conventionally pianistic, though clearly from the same mould). Absolutely lovely: it's like being in the room with them. Let's hope for more of this.
Michael Tumelty
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