Wilde plays Schumann

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Robert Schumann (1810–1856)

Liszt: Sonata in B minor / Busoni: Elegies David Wilde piano (DCD34030)

David Wilde piano Disc One Fantasie in C 1 Durchaus phantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen 2 Mässig. Durchaus energisch 3 Langsam getragen. Durchweg leise zu halten Total playing time (CD 1)

[14:57] [8:44] [13:15]

[36:59]

Bryce Morrison writes: ‘I first heard David play the Busoni Elegies at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. I also heard his earlier recording of the Liszt Sonata.

These performances, as cogent as they were lucid and powerful, have long stayed in my memory, yet they are far excelled by Delphian’s present offering.

Here, surely, is blazing confirmation of what Sir Michael Tippett once called “the immense effort of interpretation”, by means of a rare communicative vividness and force. In a time of increasing musical homogeneity David Wilde’s Liszt and Busoni stand out for their very special drama and integrity.’

‘Wilde lives up to his name in Liszt’s B minor Sonata … a performance heaving with free-flowing passion, power and zeal’ – The Scotsman, August 2007

Disc Two Kinderszenen 1 I. Von fremden Ländern und Menschen 2 II. Kuriose Geschichte 3 III. Hasche – Mann 4 IV. Bittendes Kind 5 V. Glückes genug 6 VI. Wichtige Begebenheit 7 VII. Träumerei 8 VIII. Am Kamin 9 IX. Ritter vom Steckenpferd 10 X. Fast zu ernst 11 XI. Fürchtenmachen 12 XII. Kind im Einschlummern 13 XIII. Der Dichter spricht

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Luigi Dallapiccola: a portrait David Wilde piano, Susan Hamilton soprano, Nicola Stonehouse mezzosoprano, Robert Irvine cello (DCD34020) Luigi Dallapiccola is one of the most celebrated Italian composers of the twentieth century. This disc features chamber music and songs alongside his complete works for solo piano. Whether drawing on the music of the past to nourish the contrapuntal organisation of his own, or concentrating on the opportunities for gentle lyricism afforded by bell-like vocal and instrumental sonorities, Dallapiccola’s commitment to traditional expressive nuance has been seen by critics as a powerful aspect of his Italian insistence upon cantabilità – songfulness. ‘a marriage of discipline and imagination of which Wilde is fully aware …

[Nicola Stonehouse] is eloquence itself in the Goethe-Lieder’ – Gramophone, April 2007

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David Wilde on Delphian

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Fantasie in C, Op 17 Wilde plays Chopin at the Wigmore Hall David Wilde piano (DCD34010) Pianist David Wilde brings astounding vibrancy and exuberance to the Polish master in this account of late Chopin. Wilde, for whom ‘every performance is a confrontation with himself’, counts among his mentors Solomon, Reizenstein, Elinson and Boulanger. In this bold live recital, he presents repertoire that conflicts with the feminine, gentle aspect of popular Chopin myth. Wilde argues instead that Chopin’s wide-ranging music ‘includes an element of physical passion and a feeling for the heroic and for dramatic tension no less arresting than that of Liszt’. ‘wholeheartedly committed, authoritative and at times dazzlingly virtuosic’ – Gramophone, November 2002 ‘One senses the touch of a master’ – The Scotsman, July 2002 Brahms: Variations Op 21 No 1 & Op 24; Rhapsodies Op 79; Intermezzi Op 117 David Wilde piano (DCD34040) Wilde sees the simple grace and lyricism favoured by many pianists as an evasion of a deeper poetic truth, and if he gives us all of Brahms’s exulting strength in the fugue from the ‘Handel’ Variations, he is no less responsive to darker nights of the soul in Op 117. Always there is an open invitation to reappraise Brahms’s genius, not by a radical re-interpretation (the determinedly ‘different’ way of, say, Gould or Pogorelich), but by a probing and enquiring look beneath the music’s surface life. David Wilde may be true to the composer, but he is a pianist to make you think again. – Bryce Morrison ‘David Wilde’s recording of Liszt’s B minor Sonata (coupled with Busoni’s Elegies) was for me one of the most revelatory CDs of 2007, and this latest offering is no less rewarding. Wilde rethinks and reinterprets standard repertory without distorting the score or imposing personal whims. … Wilde’s pianism is consummate in every way and his technique is effortless, with a huge variety of colour and dynamic shading.’ – International Record Review, June 2009

Kinderszenen, Op 15 Carnaval, Op 9

Carnaval 14 I. Préambule 15 II. Pierrot 16 III. Arlequin 17 IV. Valse noble – Intermezzo (Paganini) – Tempo I ma più vivo 18 V. Eusebius 19 VI. Florestan 20 VII. Coquette 21 VIII. Réplique 22 IX. Sphinxes [transcr. David Wilde] 23 X. Papillons 24 XI. Lettres dansantes (ASCH-SCHA) 25 XII. Chiarina 26 XIII. Chopin 27 XIV. Estrella 28 XV. Reconnaissance 29 XVI. Pantalon et Colombine 30 XVII. Valse allemande – Intermezzo (Paganini) – Tempo I ma più vivo 31 XVIII. Aveu 32 XIX. Promenade 33 XX. Pause – Marche des Davidsbündler contre les Philistins Total playing time (CD 2) Recorded on 14 March & 1 April 2009 at the Reid Concert Hall, University of Edinburgh Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing & mastering: Paul Baxter

Piano: Steinway Model D Grand Piano, 1995, serial no 527910 Piano technician: Norman W. Motion, consultant to Steinway & Sons Photography © Delphian Records

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[52:19] Design & cover image: Drew Padrutt Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk With thanks to the University of Edinburgh

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Notes on the music The C major Fantasie is often regarded as the finest of all Schumann’s piano works.

A quasi-sonata, its three movements were originally entitled ‘Ruins’, ‘Triumphal Arch’ and ‘Starry Crown’, and it is easy to see them as a highly emotional autobiographical statement.

Threatened with the loss of his beloved Clara, Schumann considered the first movement ‘the most impassioned thing I have ever written – a deep lament for you’. The rousing second movement suggests the response of Clara (Clara herself thought it depicted the triumphant return of a warrior), and the finale is a postlude of dreamy Eusebian rapture, its harmonic and rhythmic life like constantly shifting sunset vapour. The original headings were later replaced by four lines from Schlegel, a more cryptic expression of Schumann’s love.

‘Through all the sounds … one gentle note is threaded / For him who hears in secret.’

The ‘gentle note’ is surely that of Schumann’s undying love and devotion to Clara, but there is a direct musical quotation in the coda of the first movement from the sixth of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte songs. Liszt, to whom the Fantasie is dedicated, hoped that Schumann would write a work to help him raise money for a statue of Beethoven. Schumann responded with what he then called his Grande Sonata, and his disguised tribute could hardly have been more apt. It is possible, too, to see the influence of Beethoven in the march-like dotted rhythms of the second movement, an

obsessive device of Schumann’s which never seems far from the alla marcia of Beethoven’s Sonata Op 101. Clara rejoiced more in the slower middle section, saying: ‘I fancy myself standing among the maidens and crowning you, my dear … and doing much besides.’ Liszt himself never played the Fantasie in public, but he made his own, doubtless unconscious tribute in the most popular of his three Liebesträume, where the slow arpeggios which open Schumann’s finale appear in a sensuous and wholly Lisztian transmutation.

Kinderszenen is, like Debussy’s Children’s Corner, a touching and vernal evocation of childhood. Writing to Clara in 1838, Schumann recalls her description of his endearing and childlike nature.

Anyhow I suddenly got an inspiration, and knocked off about thirty quaint little things, from which I have selected twelve [sic] and called them Kinderscene.

They will amuse you but of course you must forget that you are a performer … they all explain themselves, and what’s more are as easy as possible.

Schumann insisted that the titles of each of these thirteen magically unified and contrasted gems came after the music (again, such insistence was later paralleled by Debussy). In other words, a verbal clue was not the same as the music’s most elusive and poetic essence.

As so often with Schumann, the opening provides a pattern or outline that is to be subtly

Wilde was twice honoured by the Bosnians: in 2003 he was awarded a diploma by the International Peace Committee of Sarajevo ‘for services to human rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina and throughout Europe’, and in 2005 he was presented with the ‘Symbol of the Open Door’, representing honorary Bosnian Citizenship.

Wilde has given many concert tours of the UK and played frequently with all the major London orchestras, all the BBC orchestras, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Bournemouth Symphony, City of Birmingham Symphony, Royal Scottish National and Hallé Orchestras. He appeared regularly at the Henry Wood Proms with conductors such as Horenstein, Boulez and Downes. He has toured New Zealand and played and taught in India, Australia, Bulgaria, Russia, Canada, the USA, most countries of Western Europe and, of course, Hungary. His recordings include all of Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano and the sonata by Reizenstein with Erich Gruenberg, Alan Bush’s Variations, Nocturne and Finale on an English Sea Song (in a version for piano and orchestra which Wilde had premiered at the Cheltenham Festival), and concertos by Thomas Wilson (especially composed for Wilde) and by Sir Lennox Berkeley. In his recently published diaries

Berkeley, who was present at the recording of his concerto, wrote simply: ‘David Wilde was first class.’

More recently, Wilde has commissioned a sonata from Gabriel Jackson with funds from the Scottish Arts Council, the BrittenPears Trust and the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, and premiered it at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh in 2007. He gave the European premiere of this work during a recital in Braunschweig, Germany in October 2008.

In 2007 EMI reissued Wilde’s 1968 HMV Liszt recital, coupled with Liszt recordings by Earl Wild. Wilde now records exclusively for Delphian Records: a live Chopin recital, the complete piano works of Luigi Dallapiccola, a highly acclaimed Liszt Sonata coupled with the seven Elegies of Busoni, and most recently a Brahms recital released in autumn 2008.

A Beethoven disc including the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata is scheduled for spring 2010.

Wilde has two children by his first marriage, and since retirement from his position in Hannover in 2000 lives with his second wife, writer and historian Jane Mary Wilde, in Bathgate, near Edinburgh.

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David Wilde ‘Superb performer, magnificent musician’ – Nadia Boulanger

Wilde is a passionate teacher, and his pupils include Jack Gibbons, Christopher Oakden, Thomas Hell and Irina Georgieva. Wilde taught at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover from 1981 to 2000, and was made a Professor Emeritus of the State of Lower Saxony in 1983. He has given many lectures in both English and German, including his paper on psychology and the meaning of music, ‘Listening to the Shadows’. His analysis of Liszt’s B minor Sonata, which he read and illustrated at London’s Analytical Psychology Club (of which he is an elected life member), was originally written as a contribution to the book Analectia Lisztiana, ed. Michael Saffle (publ. Virginia Tech).

Pianist and composer David Wilde was born in Manchester in 1935. A busy wartime career as ‘boy pianist’ brought him to the attention of the legendary pianist Solomon, who arranged for Wilde to study with his pupil and assistant Franz Reizenstein. Later, from 1949, Wilde studied composition with Professor Richard Hall at the Royal Manchester College of Music (precursor of the Royal Northern College of Music), of which he was elected a Fellow in 1953, the same year he was awarded the prestigious Walter Dayas Gold Medal.

During the 1990s, having travelled to besieged Sarajevo to support his heroic colleagues there, In 1961 Wilde won a first prize at the LisztWilde composed several works protesting Bartók competition in Budapest. The legendary against human rights abuses in our time, Nadia Boulanger was a jury member, and notably The Cellist of Sarajevo (1992), the Suite invited him to visit her in Paris at any suitable for Violin and Piano, Cry ‘Bosnia Herzegovina’, time, so when in the same year Wilde was the String Quartet (of which the last movement awarded a senior scholarship by the Caird is a ‘Threnody for the Unknown Victim of War Foundation of Dundee he wrote to accept her and Oppression’), and the opera London under invitation and ask if he might work with her.

Siege, after an idea by Bosnian poet Goran She responded most encouragingly, and Wilde Simic. The Cellist of Sarajevo, dedicated to joined her in Paris and at the Conservatoire Vedran Smailovic, is played the world over and Americain in Fontainebleau (of which Boulanger was recorded by Yo-Yo Ma for Sony Classical, was then Musical Director) in 1963, and again and the opera London under Siege was in 1964 and 1968, remaining in close touch produced by the State Theatre of Lower Saxony with ‘Mademoiselle’ for the rest of her long life. in 1998. The then Governor of Sarajevo travelled to Germany to attend the first performance.

echoed throughout, and the economy and precision of Kinderszenen are among its chief glories. Highlights include an ‘Entreating Child’ whose request is left tantalizingly unanswered.

Happiness becomes perfect (‘Perfect Happiness’) in a radiant transition from D to F major, and in ‘Dreaming’ a whole world of possibilities somehow spirals from its famous opening four-bar phrase.

partners at a German ball. As a whole, the work has absolutely no artistic value, but individually the various states of feeling seem to me of interest.

Subtitled ‘Scenes Mignonnes sur Quatre Notes’, Schumann’s musical acrostic is teasingly intricate, particularly when combined with an elaborate world of private allusion and fantasy. Schumann took his cue from Jean Paul, who once remarked that ‘a masked In ‘Frightening’, abrupt changes of pace and ball is perhaps the most perfect medium material eerily evoke a sense of childhood through which poetry can interpret life,’ and menace, and in ‘A Child Falling Asleep’, only the invitations to the dance are bewilderingly Schumann could convey so movingly a sense diverse. Characters from the ancient commedia of simultaneous happiness and unease – dell’arte such as Pierrot, Arlequin, Pantalon happiness for present innocence, concern for and Columbine rub shoulders with such the future clouds of experience. Kinderszenen distinguished guests as Chopin and Paganini, concludes with an epilogue in which a poet The two most important women in Schumann’s declaims his lines with a superb gravity and life, Chiarina (Clara) and Estrella (Ernestine), are poise, advising peace, and somehow allaying divided by Chopin’s passionate admonition, and both adult and childhood fear and pain. the whole is framed by a grandiose introduction and finale and retrospective march. Eusebius According to Schumann, Carnaval (composed and Florestan (Schumann’s two most dearly in 1835) cherished fictions) are, of course, also present, whether as official guests or as important was written mostly for different occasions, and is for moods partially hidden behind the more the most part founded on the notes ASCH [A, E flat, C, B] reticent or resilient dances. The ‘Valse noble’ which form the name of a little town in Bohemia echoes the preceding ‘Arlequin’, ‘Florestan’ where I had a lady friend and which, curiously enough, remembers Papillons, Op 2, and ‘Replique’ are also the only musical letters in my name. I added mournfully recalls ‘Coquet’. ‘Paganini’ is a less the titles later, but is not music itself always enough whimsical but entirely original recreation, with and sufficiently expressive? ‘Estrella’ is a name such as one writes under portraits to fix the picture better in his violin evoked in dazzling pianistic terms. one’s memory, ‘Reconaissance’ a scene of recognition. Here, the left hand commences fortissimo and ‘Promenade’: a walk such as one takes with one’s off the beat and the right hand starts on the

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beat and piano. His sudden presence in the middle of the winsome ‘Valse allemande’ is no less abruptly removed. A series of chords are altered by a rapid pedal change into an entirely foreign cadence and almost before we realise it, the daemonic presence has vanished and we return to music of the most discreet charm and elegance.

Today, it is perhaps difficult for us to appreciate fully the originality of Carnaval. The commonly accepted lingua franca of earlier classical composition is not so much ignored as openly rejected, and Schumann’s music has a force and character unusual even in an age noted for extreme individuality. © 2009 Bryce Morrison Bryce Morrison is an internationally famous teacher, critic, broadcaster and pianist, and is considered among the world’s leading authorities on piano performance.

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Fantasie in C: the manuscript Shortly before my first recording of the Fantasie – for Saga, in 1978 – was made, the catalogue at Sotheby’s in London announced the sale of the manuscript of the Schumann Fantasie, formerly in the possession of the Alois Schmidt family.

In great excitement, Saga producer Martin Compton and I went to examine this manuscript at the sale-rooms, but in the event it turned out to be only the first movement of the present work. However, the look of the manuscript suggested that this movement, entitled ‘Ruinen’, was all that Schumann had at first intended to write. The manuscript bore the legend, Une Fantasie pour le Pianoforte dedié à [name obliterated], and was numbered Op 16a, with numerous other opus numbers (Op 12, Op 15, Op 16) crossed out. The indication at the top of the score read Mit durchaus heftige Empfindung und ganz frei vorzutragen – ‘Throughout with violent feeling and continually free’ – whereas the printed versions change this to Durchaus fantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen – ‘Throughout fantastically and passionately sustained’. The original makes good sense; but substituting sustained for free is also good advice, because with too much tempo rubato this ‘violent’ and ‘fantastic’ movement can easily fall apart.

Other interpretative details from the score, apparently overlooked or changed in the printed editions, I have reinstated in my performance. In bar 17, just before the theme returns (softly, and

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at twice the original speed), Schumann marks a tempo, instead of ritardando as in the printed versions. Even more important, and to my mind much more effective than the usual reading, is that beautiful moment when the second theme loses itself in dreams, and the tempo is marked Adagio. Schumann, in the manuscript, stays with the slow tempo for the two measures of fortissimo which follow, thus proclaiming this quotation from Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte like a thunderous pronouncement from on high. (These two measures are also isolated with double bar-lines.)

There is another textual deviation from the first manuscript in modern editions, at bb. 231/232, where I have taken the liberty of reinstating Schumann’s original pianistic layout as I found it in the manuscript, which seems to me to sound richer and fuller on the modern instrument.

There are two other details of more general interest in the manuscript: the episode usually headed ‘Im Legendenton’ is called ‘Romanza’; and on the gentle codetta that ends this section Schumann writes, revealingly, quasi Oboe. The dedication to Liszt does not appear on the manuscript. It was added later, and subsequently removed by Clara Schumann, who was no friend of Liszt’s.

For the other two movements, I have based my readings on the first printed edition (Breitkopf und Härtel, 1839), on the later edition prepared

by Clara Schumann (‘edited from the manuscripts and from her personal recollections’), and on editions by Peters and Augener.

Carnaval: the Sphinxes In some, though not all, editions of Carnaval the ‘Sphinxes’ are marked ‘not to be played’.

However, both Cortot and Rachmaninoff, in their legendary Carnaval recordings of the 1920s, include them: Cortot plays them in bass octaves, and Rachmaninoff improvises on them. I have taken my cue from the historical link between the introspective Schumann and the early expressionists, accompanying the sphinxes with themselves in a Schoenbergian manner. © 2009 David Wilde