Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann (1810–1856) was a German composer and music critic of the early Romantic era. His piano works and songs remain among the most enduring of the period.
Until 1840 his published music was almost entirely for solo piano, including character cycles such as Carnaval and the Davidsbündlertänze. The year of his marriage brought a flood of lieder, among them the Heine and Eichendorff Liederkreis sets and Dichterliebe.
He then turned to orchestra, chamber music and larger vocal forms: four symphonies, a piano concerto, an opera, and intimate pieces still central to the repertoire, from Album für die Jugend and the Phantasiestücke to the romances and folk-style pieces for wind or cello with piano. As editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik he also shaped how a generation heard new music.
Robert Schumann is featured on the following titles
In Other Words
Violinist Anna McMichael and pianist Daniel de Borah devised this programme of transcriptions, two of Australia’s most accomplished chamber musicians. They play the music with virtuosity and style.
Schumann: Complete Works for Oboe
Two Canberra colleagues whose tastes aligned present the most complete set of Schumann’s works for the oboe—and of pieces not written for it. Sitsky, better known as a composer, contributes his transcription of the neglected pedal-piano Etudes.
Schumann: Lieder
Gerald English, then in his seventies, was still singing magnificently. Here he joins Perth-based pianist and composer Roger Smalley, whose work as an accompanist is little known. This is the first of several Tall Poppies projects featuring English.
Compositions by Robert Schumann also appear on
Romantic Rarities
Ian Holtham is a distinguished Melbourne pianist with a long discography of Classical and Romantic repertoire, especially Chopin. On his first Tall Poppies release he turns to relatively rare works from the piano literature.
Flash: Marimba Miniatures
Flash is Claire Edwardes’s second Tall Poppies recording: a warm programme of marimba miniatures drawn from her pianist beginnings and life with two young daughters, pairing new Australian works with transcribed children’s piano gems on the five-octave marimba.
A Virtuoso Recital: David Stanhope Piano
This is the third solo CD that David has recorded for Tall Poppies (see also Virtuoso Transcriptions, TP088, and David Stanhope Plays, TP135). The centrepiece is Rachmaninoff's Preludes, Op. 32, which he plays magnificently.
Cello Rhapsody
Pereira's main strength is his passion, heard here in repertoire that ranges from the simplicity of songs to the dramatic nuance of the Hispanic rhapsodies.
For Children
Geoffrey Tozer plays piano music by Bach, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Schubert, Prokofiev, Bartók and Schumann written especially for children.