Scenes from Childhood: Piano Music of Robert Schumann

Scenes from Childhood. Piano Music of Robert Schumann

Stephanie McCallum

This disc was released to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth the great and troubled genius, Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856) and contains masterpieces from the 1830s when Schumann occupied himself entirely with innovative music for the keyboard. The major works are Scenes from Childhood, Op. 15, an imaginative series of pictures about childhood, written while Schumann yearned for a domestic life with Clara Wiek, the Fantasie, Op. 17, Schumann's tribute to Beethoven and reinterpretation of classical form, and Papillons, Op. 2, an innovative exploration of whimsy and Romantic fragmentary form, inspired by Jean Paul's incomplete novel Flegeljahre. In this recording, which has been praised for its freshness and clarity, Stephanie McCallum returns to Schumann's original tempo indications, which are often lighter and quicker than the performance tradition which grew from the edition by Clara Wieck.

"The great virtue McCallum brings is an absence of the usual foibles: sentimentality and over-interpretation. They are performances of no-frills honesty and a fresh view of the music." Graham Strahle, The Australian. August 7, 2010. More