Schumann: (Grosse) Humoreske in B-flat, Op. 20

[amw]

|

Imogen Cooper has recorded Schumann's Humoreske twice. The BBC recording dates from a 1994 Wigmore Hall recital; the Chandos recording is a 2014 studio production. I've always thought the first one was the best, but have never tried to quantify why.

The 1994 recording is, as the timings might imply, fast and incredibly urgent. (At a total timing of 24:46, this beats out Horowitz, the nearest competitor, by about thirty seconds.) I was listening to a newish recording by Luca Buratto recently, almost a minute faster, which felt rushed and superficial in all respects. This does not feel that way: here the tempi are an essential part of the conception and enhance the interpretation significantly. The 2014 recording comes in at a more sedate 27:05.

The 1994 recording has some moments of exceptional use of piano sound, for example the use of resonance in the harsh, slow Mit einigem Pomp, the only segment of the piece played more slowly than usual. But Cooper is not much of a colourist as a rule, and where it stands out is mostly for its impassioned, almost ecstatic character, painful and joyful at the same time. "The whole week I sat at the piano in a state and composed, wrote, laughed, and cried; now you can find all this beautifully painted in my Opus 20." Very few other performances actually get this. Here it feels as though neither the humour nor the melancholy is given short measure, which is a rarity: a genuine bipolar Humoreske. Could the music use some additional moments of repose? Perhaps. But for what it is it's quite convincing. (It is also an unedited live recording, so there are a few minor technical errors.)

The 2014 recording starts out similarly, with the same kind of hushed urgency in the opening Einfach, and then begins to lose steam once it hits the more difficult Sehr rasch und leicht. Cooper has become more concerned with colour in the interim, so there's a lot more pedal effects and a bit less of that appealing neutral harshness in the playing, but this comes at the cost of energy. It is still an appealing recording, don't get me wrong, but the emotional edge that made the earlier account special is missing: it's predominantly sane and calculated, with no way to sustain the illusion that the entire composition is a single very long breath, or the air of improvisation. At times, however, it does attain a pianistic beauty that the earlier account can't (or doesn't aim for, at least), and it does have the moments of repose that were lacking in the earlier recording. Predominantly, therefore, it winds up feeling melancholy. I wouldn't say it's autumnal, but the wildness is missing. This is also a valid interpretation (the Sviatoslav Richter, Piotr Anderszewski thing).

Overall, will say the 2014 recording comes off better than I'd tended to think of it, and I'm glad to have it, but my preference for the 1994 recording remains validated.