MUSIC REVIEW--Andras Schiff at Carnegie Hall

Reviewed by Bill Breakstone, October 27, 2010

For music lovers who appreciate the music of Robert Schumann, Carnegie Hall was the place to be last night. The brilliant Hungarian pianist offered a very interesting program devoted to Schumann’s early piano compositions in a recital that was intriguing, fascinating and, in ways, highly unusual.

There is no living pianist who I admire more than Schiff. I have known his work for over 35 years now, from the early period of his career when he mostly concentrated on Bach keyboard compositions, to stunning effect. His development as a keyboard artist expanded to include his native Slavic composers—Bartok, Smetana and Janacek, then the masterpieces of the classical literature, including Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. In 1999, Schiff toured several European cities performing some of the piano compositions of Robert Schumann, to critical acclaim. One concert was given in Zurich that May, and was recorded “live,” subsequently released on CD by ECM. The program consisted of Schumann’s Humoresque, Op. 20; the complete Novelletten, Op. 21; the Klaviersonate in f-minor, Op. 14; and the Nachtstucke, Op. 23. That recording is as fine an example of Schumann performance as one could come by, and is one of the most treasured possessions in my musical library.

Schiff has turned once again to the music of Schumann during his current North American tour, and appeared last night at Carnegie Hall for a rather long and engrossing reading of some of the composer’s piano works. The program this time included the Waldszenen, Op. 82; the Davidsbundlertanze, Op. 6; the Kinderszenen, Op. 15; the Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13; and as encores, the Papillons, Op. 2; and, finally, the final movement of the Phantasie, Op. 17.

My pedagogical grandfather Ernest Hutchison wrote of Schumann, “All too often does genius encounter tragedy. Beethoven’s deafness, Schubert’s grinding poverty and early death, Chopin’s unhappy life—“an episode with no beginning and with a sorrowful end”—the blindness of Milton, the suicide of Chatterton when help was near, the broken heart of Keats—these are but a few of the historic catastrophes of art. With them we must place the insanity of Schumann, the ultimate disaster of a chequered life. Having lamed a hand and ruined his prospects as a pianist, he earned the gratitude of posterity by diverting his talents to composition. His fecund imagination gave birth to a long series of vivid works before it grew barren under the approaching decay of his mind.”

Schumann was a compositional revolutionary. He moved classical music to new frontiers, highly emotional and expressive, sometimes bound by traditional conventions of composition, other times not. The piano was his natural medium of expression. Even his lieder are written not solely for voice, but for voice and piano, and feature an equal partnership between vocal expressiveness and that of the keyboard instrument, on an equal basis.

His output for the piano is predominated by compositions that could be classified as miniatures, on the one hand, and works of a larger scale, either in sonata form, variations that combine a unity of expression that are interconnected thematically, harmonically or rythmetically; or revert to other traditional compositional forms, such as the toccata. Schiff’s program last night mainly concentrated on the former. The Waldszennen, Davidsbundlertanze, Kinderszenen and Papillion’s all represent rather unconnected musical expressions, relatively short in duration, character pieces that invoke a mood, scene, emotion, or literary reference. The two exceptions were the Symphonic Etudes and the final encore, the last movement of the Phantasie.

With the exception of the Phantasie, there exists in Schumann’s writing a wide shift in moods from the lyrical to the impulsive, from a legato style to a much more up-tempo and frenetic pace. Schiff is a master performer who is perfectly capable of balancing these opposites, but I must admit that last night he seemed more at ease with the former and less so with the later.

As I mentioned to the artist back stage, I doubt a concertgoer had ever heard a movement of the Phantasie performed as an encore, nor ever would again. This work is one of the masterpieces of the piano literature, and to offer an excerpt of it as an encore was, in the words of a famous fellow musician I chatted with before talking with Schiff, highly unusual. It would have been far more appropriate to delete one of the “miniatures,” and performed the entire Phantasie. Those reservations having been stated, the recital was an engrossing evening of music making.