Clara Schumann: Romance: The Piano Music of Clara Schumann

Isata Kanneh-Mason’s debut solo recording, released on Decca in 2019 to mark the 200th anniversary of Clara Schumann’s birth, is built almost entirely around Clara’s own compositions rather than the far more frequently performed music of her husband Robert. It entered the Classic FM Chart at No. 1, the first Clara Schumann recording ever to do so, and drew praise from Gramophone as “one of the most charming and engaging debuts.”

About the programme

The disc opens with Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7, written when she was still a teenager and already an established touring virtuoso, recorded here with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Holly Mathieson. It’s followed by a run of her solo piano writing, the Three Romances for Piano, Op. 11, the Scherzo No. 2 in C minor, Op. 14, and her Piano Sonata in G minor, plus the Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22, with violinist Elena Urioste joining Kanneh-Mason for the disc’s one chamber work. The programme isn’t entirely free of Robert Schumann’s music: it closes with Clara’s own piano transcriptions of two of his songs, “Widmung” and “Mondnacht”, a deliberate inclusion of her work as an arranger, not a straight performance of Robert’s music standing in for her own.

About the performer

Isata Kanneh-Mason studied at the Royal Academy of Music and is the eldest of the seven Kanneh-Mason siblings, several of whom, most prominently her brother, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, have also built prominent classical recording careers. This Clara Schumann disc, her first solo recording, was a deliberate choice of repertoire rather than a conventional debut built around standard-repertoire war-horses: centring a first album on a historically under-recorded composer, timed precisely to that composer’s bicentenary, set out Kanneh-Mason’s own musical priorities from the start of her recording career rather than easing into them later. Clara Schumann herself was a celebrated touring virtuoso pianist and a working composer for decades, publishing music alongside a demanding international performing career and raising a large family, a body of work that fell into relative obscurity for much of the 20th century as musical history focused on her husband, before a sustained revival of interest in her own compositions over recent decades, of which this recording is itself a part.

About Clara Schumann

Clara Wieck was already a celebrated touring virtuoso pianist across Europe as a teenager, trained intensively by her father Friedrich Wieck, before she married Robert Schumann in 1840 against her father’s fierce and legally contested objection. Across a career that included raising eight children, a demanding international performing schedule that continued for decades after Robert’s death in 1856, and long stretches spent managing his declining mental health, she also composed steadily, the Piano Concerto recorded here was written and first performed when she was still a teenager, with Felix Mendelssohn conducting one of its early performances. After Robert’s death she devoted much of her later career to editing and promoting his music rather than her own, which is part of why her own compositions fell into relative neglect for much of the following century, before a sustained scholarly and performing revival from the later 20th century onward restored her standing as a significant composer in her own right, not simply a supporting figure in her husband’s biography.

A note on this page

This review is freshly written to cover a real recording, rather than recovered from mmmusic’s original 1991–2018 archive, this disc was released in 2019, the year after the shop’s archive record ends, and no original mmmusic review of it survives in any archive we could find. It’s written from independently verified facts about the recording, its reception and its performers, as part of the site’s coverage of new classical releases alongside the material genuinely recovered from the original site.