Album notes:
A tortured, hyper-sensitive aesthete who came to a tragic and lonely end in a mental asylum; an earthy, often cantankerous train-spotter and pigeon-fancier who died as a national treasure, surrounded by a loving family. On the face of it, Schumann and Dvorák might seem to have had very little in common (apart from being great composers who enjoyed drinking beer). But in fact there are many links between them—and not least between their respective piano concertos. An obvious connection appears in the considerable shape of Johannes Brahms, who who was to sponsor Dvorák’s career in much the way Schumann had sponsored his own. Brahms performed as soloist in Schumann’s piano concerto (that must have been fascinating!), and was enthusiastic about Dvorák’s. But there are many non-Brahmsian links between the two works, as well: both concertos were completed within weeks of their respective composers’ thirty-fifth birthdays; both were written quickly, in bursts of inspiration (two bursts, in Schumann’s case); both were initially rejected by publishers; both employ identical instrumentation, with classical-sized orchestras—Dvorák citing Schumann as a model in that respect, for his adherence to Mozartean proportions; both were their composers’ first and only completed piano concertos, to be followed by single concertos for violin and cello; and both concertos, most crucially, treat piano and orchestra as equals.

For Schumann and Dvorák this last feature was the result of their shared conviction that concertos should be major musical statements, not just vehicles for soloists to display their prowess with an orchestra following limply behind. In a review written in 1836 for his journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann rebuked modern composers for their slapdash approach to the orchestral parts in piano concertos: ‘I am going to reprimand the composers of concert-concertos …  the solos are all finished and ready to go before the tuttis—unconstitutionally enough, for after all the consent of the parliament—the orchestra, that is—should be necessary before the piano concerto undertakes anything. And why not begin at the real beginning? Was our world created on the second day?’ Three years later, in an article bemoaning the general demise of the piano concerto as a form, he wrote: ‘We must confidently await the genius who will show us a brilliant new way of combining orchestra and piano, so that the autocrat at the keyboard may reveal the richness of his instrument and of his art, while the orchestra, more than a mere onlooker, with its many expressive capabilities adds to the artistic whole.’

Eventually, Schumann was to discover the requisite genius—himself; but it took time. To say that he had difficulty with the genre would be rather an understatement: he had already embarked on, but failed to complete, seven piano concertos, or concert-pieces, by the time he began work on a new piece for piano and orchestra in May 1841, the year after his marriage to the pianist Clara Wieck. Clara had for some time been urging him to write for orchestra: ‘The piano simply isn’t enough for you.’ Schumann had obliged at the beginning of the year with his wondrous Symphony No 1, the ‘Spring’, followed by the Overture, Scherzo and Finale. Now, emboldened by his newfound mastery of orchestral composition, he turned his thoughts to a fresh creation for piano with orchestra. Originally entitled Allegro affettuoso, this single movement became a self-contained Phantasie, before being transformed into the opening movement of the Piano Concerto in A minor, Op 54.

As was Schumann’s wont, he wrote the Phantasie in a fit of white-heat inspiration, completing it within seventeen days. Clara tried it out at a rehearsal in Weimar on 13 August 1841, at which the ‘Spring’ Symphony was also played. ‘My joy in the Symphony and in the Phantasie and my own playing’, she reported, ‘brought me to such a pitch of excitement that I was ill the whole afternoon.’ (Clara really knew how to have a good time!) Despite this, Schumann was unable to find a publisher for the work, one after another turning it down. Fools; but perhaps we should be grateful for their obtuseness, since it was presumably because of these refusals that Schumann returned to the work. Some four years after the completion of the Phantasie, he decided to add extra movements in order to turn it into a full concerto. First to be composed, in June 1845, was the eventual finale (originally entitled Rondo). Clara assumed that that was it: ‘Robert has made a lovely final movement for his Phantasie … thereby turning it into a concerto for me to play next winter. I am very happy about this for I have always lacked a sizeable bravura piece from him.’ (Hard to understand why she didn’t consider the sonatas and great piano cycles that Robert had already written as ‘sizeable bravura pieces’; but perhaps she meant specifically works with orchestra.) More was to come, of course; by mid-July he had completed an Andantino, later to be entitled Intermezzo—the work’s central movement. Clara reported on 31 July that she was as ‘happy as a king’ at the prospect of playing the whole concerto. And she was right to be thrilled: Schumann’s piano concerto has become one of his most celebrated works, played by every major pianist and beloved everywhere for its ardent passion, its glorious melodies, and its deep, infectious spirit of joy.

The first performance took place in Dresden, where the Schumanns were now living, on 4 December 1845, Clara presiding at the piano, the orchestra conducted by their friend, and the concerto’s dedicatee, Ferdinand Hiller. The Schumanns then returned to their former home city, Leipzig, for the second performance, on New Year’s Day 1846. This time the work was conducted by Felix Mendelssohn, no less, with his famous Gewandhaus orchestra. The success of this second performance produced a publisher for the concerto at last; it appeared in July 1846, under the auspices of the enlightened firm of Breitkopf and Härtel, with whom Schumann enjoyed a close relationship almost to the end of his days.

Rather unusually in musical history, a review of the first performance got it right: the critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung wrote that the concerto does ‘full justice to the completely obbligato, most lovingly and carefully wrought orchestral part without thereby lessening the effect of the piano, and allowing both to preserve their independence in exquisite communion’. Exactly so; the concerto’s intimate dialogue gives it the air of chamber music on a large scale—or of a love story. The spirit of Robert and Clara’s relationship hovers over the whole concerto, with allusions to works of hers, and to pieces they both treasured, sprinkled throughout the work. It is surely no coincidence, for instance, that the famous main theme of the opening Allegro affettuoso, its yearning character defined by the falling intervals that are to permeate so much of the concerto, begins with the notes C, B (H in German) and A—the musical letters of ‘Chiara’, the fanciful name by which Schumann referred to Clara in his poetic writings. As a listener, one need not necessarily be aware of the exact sources of these intimate messages; but I believe that they affect us unconsciously, their extreme sense of collusion leading us to feel that Schumann’s music is revealing secrets that (in Sir Thomas Beecham’s words) ‘each one of us feels to have been devised for his own particular understanding’.

There is far more to the concerto than just the whispering of lovers, however; excitement, humour and intense elation intermingle with the tenderness. The opening is as grandly impressive as that of any concerto, the crashing orchestral and piano chords with which the concerto announces itself immediately demanding our attention. (This striking beginning appears to have been a fairly late thought; in at least one earlier version of this much-revised movement, the orchestra allows the piano to launch the concerto, responding to the soloist’s initial figure with a similar two-note rising phrase of its own—rather startling when one is used to the final version.) From there, however, we are taken directly into Schumann’s inner world, as the ‘Chiara’ theme unfolds, sounded first by woodwinds, then gently taken up by the piano. This is followed by a flowing subsidiary theme; having collaborated on the opening gesture, and then sung the ‘Chiara’ subject in turn, piano and orchestra now join hands, as it were, sharing the new idea between them. This sense of dialogue continues as the movement progresses, orchestral and piano lines exquisitely blended throughout. Even the cadenza which appears towards the end feels discursive. Abandoning its traditional role as a chance for the soloist to improvise on the themes of the movement (and to show off), this cadenza is an integral part of the structure, leading us straight into the eager coda, in which the heartbeat of the ‘Chiara’ theme doubles in tempo, as the lover’s heart quickens at the approach of his (or her) beloved.

Before that, however, at the opening of the central development section (4'50) is a beautiful passage in the unexpected key of A flat major (musically remote from the tonic A minor, close though it is geographically), which is worth mentioning for its covert embodiment of the romantic spirit of this concerto. The piano and a solo clarinet exchange a version of the ‘Chiara’ theme that, as the Schumann biographer Martin Geck has pointed out, carries a carefully concealed message from Robert to Clara: this phrase is a reworking of a sketched duet—never published—originally intended for a volume of songs to which Robert and Clara were both to contribute. Also in A flat major, the song is based on the words: ‘I am your tree, O Gardener, / whose faithfulness maintains me in love’s care and keeping.’ Surely the very epitome of a lovers’ musical secret.

Dialogue continues in the gentle Intermezzo, with its questioning theme (‘will you be mine?’) so beautifully answered by the sweeping cello melody (‘I will, I will!’); and into the finale, introduced by the ‘Chiara’ theme heard in a visionary transformation, itself then transformed into the finale’s main subject. Grandeur alternates here with tenderness, and, as that original review noted, ‘cheeky humour’. It is an irresistible mixture. One example of that humour appears in a whimsical little fugue (3'16), probably another billet doux to Clara—Robert and Clara had been studying fugues together earlier in 1845; and another in the eccentrically syncopated violin theme (1'02, with charming comments from the bassoon added into the mix). At one of Mendelssohn’s early rehearsals of the concerto, his Gewandhaus orchestra instituted the noble tradition of making a complete mess of the awkwardly written rhythms of this passage—a tradition that has been faithfully followed by countless orchestras since. One can almost see the composer—with Clara at his side—smiling delightedly at the success of his little trick.

Although Dvorák’s concerto was at least born whole—rather than in two parts, like Schumann’s—it has had an even more difficult history than the earlier work. Initially composed within a few weeks in August–September 1876, first performed in 1878, and then revised again before its eventual publication, after much rejection, in 1883, it has all too often been criticized for its supposedly ungrateful piano-writing. In fact, the publishers who refused it seem to have been put off by the very quality which ties it to Schumann’s concerto (and to the concertos of Brahms). One of them wrote that ‘you choose to merge the piano closely with the orchestra, and this may not appeal to today’s concert artists’. But Dvorák never intended the concerto to be the sort of pianistic tour de force for which the publisher was evidently hankering. A competent but no means brilliant pianist himself (viola and organ being the instruments with which he had earned a living before his composing career took off), Dvorák chose a different path for this work, confiding in a friend while composing it that: ‘I am unable to write a concerto for a virtuoso; I must think of other things.’

It must be admitted, though, that the solo-writing is anything but pianistic; it is hideously difficult to play, and yet must sound effortless—the exact opposite of the virtuoso’s dream! So pianists grumbled; and the result of their grumblings was that after Dvorák’s death the piano part was issued in a new, heavily revised version by the Czech pianist Vilém Kurz (1872–1945). No doubt Kurz had the best intentions, seeking to popularize the piece; but the trouble is that his version, with its reinforced harmonies and smoothed-out rhythms, generally muddies the lightness and clarity that are such essential components of Dvorák’s style. Nevertheless, Kurz’s version became standard until Sviatoslav Richter, who loved the concerto, went back to Dvorák’s original and, despite the difficulties of the solo part, apparently found nothing lacking musically, or even pianistically. Other pianists started to follow his example, and so the original edition has gradually taken its rightful place as the version of choice. (An earlier manuscript has recently been discovered; but since Dvorák himself replaced it, it seems to be mostly of interest as an illustration of his working methods.) The fearless Mr Hough, of course, plays the original version on this recording.

That controversy aside, it is a mystery why this concerto has not found a more regular niche in the repertoire; how could one not love it for its glorious melodies, its warm-heartedness, its infectious celebration of life? Right from the opening bars, one is reminded of the words of the conductor Václav Talich: ‘Dvorák knew how to listen to nature … Trees, streams, stones—they all sing. The naturalistic rhythms of village music are recast into rhythmical poetry.’ Many of the qualities we most cherish in Dvorák are to be felt in the themes of this first movement. We feel the natural, affirmative warmth which is so much a part of his musical character in the autumnal melody with which the piece opens; the second subject (5'34), introduces the good-humoured, innocent dance rhythms that are so typical of the composer, while its companion theme (6'22) radiates the devotion of Dvorák the fervent Catholic. There is grandeur too, not least in the cadenza that—in an allusion to Schumann’s concerto, perhaps?—leads us into the coda. But even in the music’s most majestic moments there is a simplicity of soul that is the very essence of Dvorák—a folk-musician writing in symphonic forms. If the proportions are generous, it is because of the abundance of beautiful material. Brahms, who praised the concerto’s ‘easily shaped fantasy’, famously complained that Dvorák discarded thematic ideas that could have provided other composers with their principal material (that would have been a fine instance of nineteenth-century recycling!). This movement, with its profusion of beautiful themes, affords us a wonderful example of those melodic gifts in action.

The Andante sostenuto opens with a calm horn solo, strongly foreshadowing the ‘New World’ Symphony. An unusual feature, which produces an almost hypnotic effect, is the lack of any rhythmic variety, the only twist coming in a three-note upward figure heard at the end of the four-bar phrase. This little ornament in turn furnishes the idea for the second subject (3'32), actually more a series of rhythmic gestures than a real melody. The opposing characters of these two themes provide all the material needed for this compact movement, the conflict between them rising to a dramatic height before coming to rest peacefully in the home key of D major.

Pastoral tranquillity is instantly swept away, however, by the solo piano, launching the finale with an introductory figure that lands us firmly back in the world of folk-dance—as does the main theme (0'42), a twisting, turning dervish of a melody that has its roots deep in Czech soil. Only with the third subject (1'49) do we get a taste of melancholy; even here, though, the irresistible dance soon inveigles itself into the accompaniment—as if the jilted Slavic lover finds his feet moving, in spite of himself, and is forced to join the party. The finale as a whole, a mixture of rondo and sonata form, conveys above all a spirit of celebration; and it is no surprise that the long coda (from 10'18)—with quite enough pianistic excitement to satisfy even the sulking virtuoso—ends in a stomping, festive G major. Life is good!

from notes by Steven Isserlis © 2016