The music is better than you'd think and the performances are worse than you'd think. Of course, everyone knows that Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor from 1845 is the best German piano concerto in the Romantic interlude after Beethoven and before Brahms, but how many know that Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor from 1836 is one of the better German Romantic piano concertos and that her Konzertsatz in F minor from 1847 is one of the best single movements either Clara or Robert ever wrote for piano and orchestra? And yet it is so, and this recording is more or less the proof, more because the aural evidence is at last made manifest and less because the performers are only more or less up to the music. Pianist Lucy Parham does a persuasive job performing Clara Schumann's music; her clear tone, clean technique, and soulful interpretations are wonderfully convincing. But she does a less than persuasive job of performing Robert Schumann's music; as the cadenza of the opening Allegro affetuoso too clearly shows, it takes more than clear, clean, and soulful to play sublimely inspired and supremely difficult music. Barry Wordsworth and the BBC Concert Orchestra provide Parham a sensitive and sympathetic accompaniment and they perform brilliantly in the tuttis, but there's not much they can do when Parham can't quite hit the Allegro vivace of the closing movement. Anyone who wants to know what Clara Schumann's music sounds like could not ask for a better performance, but anyone who knows what Robert Schumann's music sounds like will be disappointed. Resonance's sound is more than adequate and less than attractive.
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