Clara From August 2014

"Between 1972 and 1982 Maazel was Music Director of The Cleveland Orchestra and between 1973-79 made a series of recordings for Decca – all of which are collected here. The repertory includes many orchestral spectaculars and Decca’s first recording in Cleveland, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, is one of the very best and a recording which has achieved reference status. “…. The precision of The Cleveland Orchestra is little short of miraculous… the recording is one of Decca’s most spectacular, searingly detailed but atmospheric too.”

Counting the album of violin sonatas he made with violinist Daniel Sepec, this is the third Schumann release from historical-instrument specialist Andreas Staier. Staier's recordings of earlier keyboard music had some really surprising sounds, but with Schumann, playing an 1837 Erard, it's a realm not too far removed from the modern piano: better able to capture the intimate shadings of the Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, perhaps. But, even more so than in previous releases, Staier has come up with a really arresting program this time, and done it full justice.

This edition celebrates and marks the 50th anniversary (December 6, 1960) of the death of the great Romanian-born pianist.

Jennifer Pike, who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition at the tender age of 12, appears to have survived the perils of prodigyhood and entered her early twenties with musical intelligence intact. Here she offers a terrific program of music from the middle of the 19th century; all of it is abstract, but it brings vividly to mind the crucial trio of creative figures who met in the early 1850s: the ailing Robert Schumann, his musically frustrated wife Clara, and the young Johannes Brahms, mooning over the latter.

Barbara Bonney's recital of the Schumanns' songs is prefaced, in the booklet-note, with a little feminist homily from the singer defending the reputation of Clara as woman and artist. Clara hardly needs that kind of defence nowadays, witness recent CDs by Skovhus and Stutzmann, plus several others not reviewed in these pages; her songs are far from patronized, let alone neglected. Yet, for all the advocacy of these singers, her inspiration remains for me intermittent, though thoroughly conventional songs are occasionally leavened by notably individual ones, such as, here, her very last and unpublished song, Loreley, which vividly conjures up that dangerous creature, particu lady in the hectic piano part, evocatively played by Ashkenazy. Indeed it seems that Heine most inspired her, as "Sic liebten sich beide" from her Op. 13 provoked a setting of economically intense meaning, to which Bonney finely responds.

– Gramophone [9/1997].

Lud Gluskin - Recorded In Europe 1924-33 (2004) {2CD Set Jazz Oracle BDW 8045}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 511 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 331 Mb
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© 1924-33, 2004 Jazz Oracle | BDW 8045
Jazz / Hot Jazz / Continental Jazz / Big Band

New horizons in historic jazz reissuing were revealed in 2005 when Jazz Oracle came out with a double-CD compendium of recordings made for about a dozen different labels between October 1924 and February 1933 in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, all involving bandleader Lud Gluskin (1898-1989). Andreas Schmauder, apparently one of the world's leading Gluskin authorities, was asked to paw through literally hundreds of 78 rpm platters to designate the 48 titles included in this package, which is loaded with precious photographs and fascinating information. Gluskin first appears as a drummer with Paul Gason and His Versatile Orchestra. "Ain't She Sweet?" is performed by the Playboys, a Detroit-based band that would soon morph into an expanded and more versatile orchestra under Gluskin's direction.

Robert Schumann's late music has undergone a revival, with its main traits of monothematicism, dense, close motivic work, and a certain spiky unpredictability having been redefined from faults into virtues. A good way, perhaps, to think about works like these three violin sonatas is that the young Brahms, visiting the Schumann household and mooning over the unavailable Clara, might easily have heard them and been directly influenced by them. Indeed, these pieces have the kind of long-range connections you find in Brahms, combined with a somewhat gnarly level of local detail, without the memorable tunes of Schumann's earlier works.

Schumann - Waldszenen, G Minor Sonata, Gesange der Fruhe - Mitsuko Uchida (2013) {Decca 478 5393}
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© 2013 Decca Music | 478 5393
Classical / Romantic / Piano

Japanese-British pianist Mitsuko Uchida continues to impress with recordings that are not so much intellectual as simply well thought out, making a challenging yet extremely satisfying overall impression. Consider the three works by Robert Schumann recorded here. Only the Waldszenen, Op. 82 (Forest Scenes), are well known. The Piano Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22, is an early but not immature work, composed in 1830 and supplied with a new finale in 1838 at the suggestion of Clara Schumann, who pointed out that while she could play the original version, few others would be able to.