Close Encounters With Music: Drama & Melodrama – The Schumanns

The ever-fascinating and intimate triangle—Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms—will be brought to new light with seldom-heard works that highlight the musical cross-references and spiritual bond that united them.

Predating accompaniment to silent film by decades, Robert’s melodrama Schön Hedwig is a forerunner to soap-opera sentimentality with a happy ending. His Piano Quartet in E-flat Major (premiered with Clara as pianist), marries Romantic lyricism with baroque counterpoint and sonic flamboyance in one of the masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire. Also featured are Clara Schumann’s piano concerto composed with a darling slow movement, a love duet between the piano and a single cello, as well as her Three Romances for piano and violin. Brahms’ greatest set of piano variations Op. 9, written after Schumann was committed to an asylum, spells out the name CLARA in its theme, in a work tender, boisterous and touched with heartfelt brilliance.

Adam Golka, piano; Itamar Zorman, violin; Helena Baillie, viola; Yehuda Hanani, cello; Michael Wise, narrator