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ROBERT SCHUMANN 1810 -1856 Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 Allegro affetuoso, Intermezzo: Andantino grazioso, Allegro vivace 1840, the year of his marriage saw a passionate outpouring of songs, well over a hundred of them, mostly on the subject of love. In thefollowing year, 1841, he was to write his'Spring'Symphony; a Symphonie Fantasia, later to be transformed into the Fourth Symphony; and a Fantasia for piano and Orchestra. It was this Fantasia, written for Clara, which ultimately became the first movement of his Piano Concerto. Three more years passed before the rest was written, years in which he turned from one medium to another. After the succession of piano music, lieder and orchestral works, there came in 1842 a sudden switch to chamber music, when he wrote three string quartets, a piano quartet and the famous piano quintet. Then he turned to choral music, writing his little-known cantata 'Paradise and the Peri' in 1843. But at the end of this year he first began to show signs of his coming mental troubles; and following a tour which took him and Clara as far afield as St. Petersburg and Moscow, he had another, more serious, period of nervous depression. Back at home in Leipzig he started work on 'Faust'. Then at the end of the year he and Clara moved to Dresden, where, in 1845, he returned to orchestral music and extended the Fantasia into a full-scale three-movement concerto. Schumann himself said that the work'comes somewhere between a concerto, a symphony and a grand sonata'. Although written for Clara to play on tour (as indeed she soon did, with much success, in Leipzig, Vienna and Budapest) it is far from being merely the virtuose showpiece which the term 'Romantic Concerto' is usually taken to suggest. Sir Donald Tovey described it as 'eminently beautiful from beginning to end...free, spacious, and balanced in form...rieh and various in ideas.'Nor does it display Schumann's often-criticised thickness of scoring. It is mainly in the symphonies that his Orchestration is apt to be turgid: in the Cello Concerto it is economical to the point of sparseness, and in the Piano Concerto the orchestral parts are carefully laid out with a real sensitivity to matters of timbre and balance. After the soloist's opening flourish, the woodwinds announce the movement's deeply poetic main theme. It is taken up by the piano (with a slight but telling change in harmony), and continued on violins with piano accompaniment. The official second subject Starts like the first subject, but now in C, the relative major key. Then in a more animated section it is taken up and extended by the clarinet. After a tutti (based on a phrase from the first subject continuation), a sudden key-change, to the distant realms of A flat major, ushers in the first part of the development section. The change in time signature and the slowing of tempo make this a contemplative and peaceful interlude.The peace is shortly disturbed by a brisk dialogue between soloist and Orchestra, based on the opening bars of the concerto. Then a long and impassioned passage for piano, with flute and Strings, leads to the home key for the recapitulation, which is fairly exact until the soloist's cadenza and the jubilant march that closes the movement. The Intermezzo is a tender movement in Schumann's shy-sounding, reticent vein. It is mainly built from the opening theme, contrast being provided by a more expansive melody on the cellos. After a reminder from the woodwind of the first movement, the finale is launched. This movement is basically in sonata form, with the vigorous opening theme as first subject and the curiously syncopated melody (which first appears on the strings, echoed legato by the piano) as the second. Schumann introduces several unorthodox touches. Most notable among these are the use of new material (a sinuous oboe theme) that plays an important part in the development; the switch to D major at the start of the recapitulation; and the triumphant reappearance of the first subject at the end of the recapitulation. None of these disturbs the movement's balance or design, and arguably they enhance the Concerto's most essential qualities: its sheer spontaneity and youthful romanticism.