Beatrice Rana's new Warner Classics album featured in Financial Times

(Photo credit: Simon Fowler)

Beatrice Rana brings delicacy to Clara and Robert Schumann’s piano concertos
By Richard Fairman
Financial Times
February 10, 2023

In a letter dated July 10 1839, Robert Schumann wrote to his beloved Clara, “You complete me as a composer, as I do you. Every thought of yours comes from my soul, just as I have to thank you for all my music.”

In death, as in life, this devoted husband-and-wife couple are eternally paired together. This new disc features both of their piano concertos (each wrote only one), like mirror images in the same key of A minor.

The composition of Clara’s concerto was a remarkable feat, especially for a woman in the middle of the 19th century. A child prodigy, she was only 14 when she wrote it and performed it as piano soloist herself at the premiere, with Mendelssohn conducting, at 16. The concerto was her only major score with orchestra. Like many youthful works, it has its clumsy moments, but there is an aura to much of the music that is Clara’s own — dreamy, lyrical, even with unexpected echoes of Chopin.

These are high-class performances of both concertos. Beatrice Rana brings strength and delicacy equally into play and her conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, gets playing of deep tone from the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

In Robert’s concerto, so often recorded, one might prefer Martha Argerich’s flashes of romantic enchantment, but there is no recording of her in Clara’s concerto. As a closing tribute, Rana adds Robert’s “Widmung” in the piano transcription by Liszt, a dedication of love written in the year of the Schumanns’ marriage, heartfelt and warmly lyrical.

‘Clara and Robert Schumann: Piano Concertos’ is released by Warner Classics.

Read the full article here.