Fanny Davies, a Clara Schumann pupil, plays Robert's piano concerto. We also have recordings of her playing the Kinderszenen and more than half of the Davidsbundlertanze. Like Lipatti and Istomin, there is a freshness that only comes from refusal to overindulge Schumann's romanticism (and, believe it or not, Richter).
What we often think of as 'romanticism' is in fact the opposite of what it actually was. The sort of slow tempo swooning that we regard as the way to properly play romantic piano music is a modern invention, whereas 19th century romanticism plays Chopin and Schumann the way Art Tatum plays standards - with the kind of spontaneity that only comes from knowing the work so well that you can bend the rhythms and bring out inner voices without breaking the line in the least.
Is this as good as Lipatti or Istomin or Richter? Not quite. Nothing else is. What this is is the best window we're going to get into secrets of how Clara Schumann might have played her husband's music. Clara Schumann was often criticized for 'softening' her husband's music. Hans von Bulow would apparently do an imitation of Clara Schumann's playing for his students which was basically a 'shred' of her husband's music. There's no way of knowing whether that accusation is true, just sexism, or merely indicative of her playing in her final years, but I'd imagine a flinty woman like Clara Schumann was so formidable that there is no way her playing was prissy in any sense - like Myra Hess.
This is not prissy playing, but Fanny Davies was nearly 70 at the time of this recording, and her technique is not entirely up to the demands of this piece. But it does have a striking amount of 19th century handbreaking. In some senses, handbreaking is like the weird appoggiatura singing and slides of popular singers that denotes emotional involvement in a way that's often artificial. But it also serves a variety of musical purposes - from variability in color to letting us hear every note in a chord. But from the standpoint of virtuosity, handbreaking leads to a distinct lack of power in the piano's attack, perhaps this is why a hypervirtuoso like Bulow might have disrespected Clara Schumann's playing as overly effeminate. Bulow was also said to be a fountain of rubato who rarely played two phrases in the same tempo - the dichtonomy between the two approaches could be as different as the approaches of Mendelssohn and Wagner.
What else is striking is how closely Davies adheres to the slow movement's very quick metronome marking and the last movement's very slow marking. The marking for the opening movement is also lightning fast, and nobody plays it quite up to tempo (to not follow that marking is, in my opinion, mostly a terrible mistake) - and at this point a tempo that fast seems beyond Davies's abilities. But hardly anybody but Davies plays the 'slow' movement as quickly as the score suggests. This leads one to the question everybody has about Schumann's tempi - are these tempi Robert's or Clara's? The metronome marks are usually quite a bit faster than the pieces are generally played - particularly the slow movements, but many pianists (and conductors) are constantly bristling at Schumann's metronome marks, feeling as though the tempi make him seem artificially sane. For me, the greatest Schumannians (Moisewitsch excepted) are generally the free spirits: like Richter and Cortot, who played in a style that Hans von Bulow would probably recognize.
So it's entirely possible that this performance is based on memories of coaching from and hearing the elderly Clara play this work. The distinctly modern approach to tempo and rubato, and the distinctly 19c approach to voiceleading and chording makes one surmise that this is almost precisely what we have here. Though ultimately, nobody knows.
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