Robert Schumann: A Tuneful Miniaturist With a Ton of Soul By ANNE MIDGETTE

January 16, 2004
Robert Schumann: A Tuneful Miniaturist With a Ton of Soul By ANNE MIDGETTE

Here are some favorite Schumann recordings of the classical-music critics of The New York Times. Availability is hard to determine in the current state of the market. Most of the recordings here can be found on Amazon.com or in major record stores. CD's range in price from $12.99 for one CD to $21.99 for a two-CD set and $40.99 for four CD's. (An introduction appears on Page 1 of Weekend.)

PIANO WORKS. Yves Nat, pianist (EMI Classics 7 67141 2; four CD's).

PIANO CONCERTO, INTRODUCTION AND ALLEGRO, PIANO WORKS. Sviatoslav Richter, pianist; Warsaw Philharmonic, conducted by Witold Rowicki and Stanislaw Wislocki (Deutsche Grammophon 447 440-2).

SYMPHONIES (4), OVERTURE, SCHERZO AND FINALE. Staatskapelle Dresden, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch (EMI Classics 5 67771 2; two CD's).

''DICHTERLIEBE,'' ''LIEDERKREIS'' (OP. 24), SONGS (WITH WOLF SONGS). Gérard Souzay, baritone; Jacqueline Bonneau and Dalton Baldwin, pianists (Testament SBT 1314).

VOCAL DUETS, SONGS. Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Leslie Guinn, baritone; Gilbert Kalish, pianist (Nonesuch 971364-2).

FLORESTAN and Eusebius were two of his alter egos: the passionate artist and the ruminative intellectual. For Robert Schumann, trying on different masks was an artistic hallmark. As a young man, he debated whether to be a writer or a musician. When he opted for music, he composed in every style: songs and piano music, symphonies and requiems. A master of small musical thoughts -- the piano vignette, the intense lied -- he inflated them onto a grand scale, linking them in a cycle (''Kinderszenen,'' ''Dichterliebe'') or working a patchwork of motifs into a large edifice (the symphonies).

He sought originality. A defender of the old (Bach), he championed the new (from Chopin to Brahms) and explored the possibilities of each musical form in turn, redefining them in the process. Voice and piano meet as equals in his songs. New themes spring up at will in his symphonies, contravening classical convention. He is still hard to pin down.

The trick to putting Schumann's music across in performance is to capture its contradictions and mood swings without overemoting. So much is going on that excess can make the music simply turgid. The best performances seem to have in common a superb matter-of-factness, an absence of flashiness.

Take the French pianist Yves Nat, whose Schumann, even heard through the fuzz of 1939 monaural recordings, is simply and excellently present, explicated rather than expounded on. Nothing is overdone, yet nothing is omitted. And Schumann, who could be somewhat callow in his earnest experiments, suddenly appears pure sophistication.

Sviatoslav Richter is not exactly understated, but his Schumann playing has the same self-evident conviction, brilliance communicated with conversational ease. There is no better recording of the virtuosic, addictive Piano Concerto than his from 1958 for Deutsche Grammophon.

Perhaps appropriately, if Schumann needs restraint, one of the best Schumann conductors of our time is also one of the most underrated. Wolfgang Sawallisch recorded the symphonies last season before retiring as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. But his earlier set with the Dresden Staatskapelle has to my ear a touch more of the spark and Florestanian freshness to which this difficult music responds. ''Difficult'' because it is hard to guide the ear (or the player) through these symphonies, with their wealth of motifs and unaccustomed structures. Mr. Sawallisch has always had a special, intangible, audible understanding of them.

You could name five great recordings of Schumann's songs alone and not be done. But ''Dichterliebe,'' the cycle on poems by Heine, certainly belongs on the list, and from the aching quiet of the word ''Verlangen'' (''yearning'') in the first song, Gérard Souzay delivers a delicately pitched, restrained and strikingly beautiful account, with a flowing line in place of too-specific diction.

Schumann's duets, by contrast, are not a cornerstone of his repertory, but they show the composer taking a genre and working to claim it. And Jan DeGaetani's expressive artistry helps reveal pieces like ''In der Nacht'' as unclaimed jewels. It's hard, once you've found them, to put them down.

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