As pianist Imogen Cooper's two-part series acknowledges, the name Schumann belongs to two composers. Some speculate that if Clara Schumann had remained dedicated to music rather than getting distracted by the stream of children she bore her husband Robert, it would be her that kept the name famous today, as one of the most celebrated pianists of all time.
Perhaps. But Clara's talents as a composer were not equal to those she possessed as a pianist. In this concert she was represented by only one work, the Op 20 Variations on a theme by her husband. Despite Cooper's sustained, fluid playing of the pieces, something seemed lacking. In a really good set of variations, you are unaware that what you are listening to is essentially the same music over and over again. Here the melancholy theme is ever-present, always at the same pitch, subject to decoration rather than transformation.
Cooper has a way of giving intense shape to her playing while at the same time making it sound artless, almost casual; this allows her to capture the Romantic spirit in so many pieces of this era without making them seem self-important. She made light of the mood swings in Robert Schumann's Novelette in F sharp minor, Op 21 No 8, lending the dryer passages an insouciant wit. This was followed by his group of "Carnival Pranks", Faschingsschwank aus Wien. Cooper made the quotation from the Marseillaise (very naughty - it was banned in Vienna at the time) ring out cheekily in the first piece, while the second flowed like an improvised song.
As Robert's protege and Clara's admirer, Brahms was practically an honorary Schumann. His Op 21 Variations on an Original Theme seemed in Cooper's performance a demonstration of the striking originality of his musical thought. The same could be said of Robert Schumann's Humoreske, Op 20, which delights in inventive effects: at one point it sounds as though the pianist's left hand isn't sure what the right is doing. Cooper sometimes sacrificed accuracy in favour of spirit, but her playing was highly coloured, and by the final bars it seemed the musician had exhausted the music as much as the other way around.
