MTT on Performing Schumann Robert Schumann’s wife, Clara, one of the great virtuoso pianists of her day, encouraged her husband to move beyond his early keyboard compositions and write for the orchestra. Schumann was a self-taught orchestrator and has been faulted for being essentially a piano composer with an imperfect grasp of large symphonic forces. But for Michael Tilson Thomas, the pianistic foundation of Schumann’s music is its strength, and he approaches the symphonies not just as a conductor, but also as a pianist. Here he discusses how he and the San Francisco Symphony perform Schumann, how together they grasp and communicate the music’s essence. As a student, I enjoyed playing Schumann’s piano pieces. They are such an evocative mix of sensitivity and eccentricity. To me, the sensibilities of Schumann’s symphonies and his piano music are closely linked. It was probably in 1968 that I heard a performance of Schumann’s Third Symphony. I was struck by it, and it became the first orchestral piece of Schumann’s I took up. Around the time I started studying it, I met Leonard Bernstein. In our conversations about music, he always asked me a lot of 6
SCHUMANN
© San Francisco Symphony, 2017