Helene Grimaud For Clara: Works by Schumann & Brahms 180g 2LP

TAS Rated 4/5 Music, 4/5 Sonics in the March 2024 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

On her 2023 album, pianist Hélène Grimaud explores the rich universe of German Romanticism, combining Robert Schumann's Kreisleriana op. 16 with Brahms' Intermezzi op. 117 and Lieder und Gesängen op. 32. Grimaud has known Schumann's Kreisleriana for most of her life. "You can spend a lifetime with a piece like this and always discover something new," the pianist says. Her special relationship with the German Romantics is evident on her album For Clara, which focuses not only on the pianist's relationship with the music of Robert Schumann and his protégé Brahms, but in particular on the two composers' connection to Clara Schumann.

Grimaud recorded Brahms' Songs and Cantos op. 32. with baritone Konstantin Krimmel, who was already her musical partner on the album Silent Songs, about which BBC Music Magazine wrote: "Konstantin Krimmel and Hélène Grimaud deserve the highest praise for their confident and unaffected performance of this beautiful, dreamlike music." Together, Grimaud and Krimmel movingly convey the themes of love, loss, devotion, and disillusionment, expressed in both words and music.

Hélène Grimaud has recorded the work before, but she seems to have added intensity this time around. She is nervously excited in the faster virtuosic numbers, but sample No. 4 to hear her marvelous control over the tonal instability that appears in many of these pieces....This is an important entry in Grimaud's catalog, with a Kreisleriana that is as fine as any.

Nominally, Robert Schumann's eight-movement piano suite, Kreisleriana, was dedicated to Chopin but, in reality, it was written for Clara Wieck, who would finally marry Schumann over the strenuous objections of her father two years later. The impetuous nature of several movements contrasted with the tender, yielding character of others sound very much like a young man in love. Hélène Grimaud has the technique and, more importantly, the heart to perform them all convincingly. From the time he showed up at the Schumann's doorstep as a clean-shaven 20-year-old, Johannes Brahms was also head-over-heels for Clara, a devotion that lasted more than four decades. Grimaud plays his four Intermezzi, Op.119, the last works he wrote for piano, with great sensitivity. Lastly, Grimaud partners with baritone Konstantin Krimmel in Brahms' 9 Lieder and Gesänge. DG's sound offers an ideal concert hall perspective, with the piano weighty but not overly immediate and Krimmel's richly textured voice possessing a powerful ring to its top register.