Mika Sasaki & Petteri Iivonen - Obsidian: Mika Sasaki plays Clara Schumann

Review Mika Sasaki & Petteri Iivonen - Obsidian: Mika Sasaki plays Clara Schumann

If she would live and work today, Clara Schumann would be the pianist superstar with a tailor-made Wunderkind-past and the today completely unusual bonus of a serious composer. Not enough, as partner and muse of contemporary composers and mother of eight children, and later as single patent, she would regularly make headlines in the press. But also in her time Clara Schumann, born Wieck was as a piano playing celebrity. As spouse of Robert Schumann, who early got seriously ill, her career as a pianist in the face of numerous pregnancies came to a standstill in her third decade and she did not have enough time any more for composing. It is, therefore, only possible to speculate on what compositional mastery Clara would have arrived under other circumstances. The album Obsidian, with which the pianist Mika Sasaki succeeds in honoring the composer Clara Schumann, witnesses where the journey could have gone. Earlier attempts to interpret their compositions in the right light failed mostly to the pianistic competence of the performers or their lacking belief in the meaningfulness of the compositions. So, it seems almost as if the previous efforts had not been able to overcome the obstinate prejudice "Of course it is nothing but women's work, lacking [...] the power and here and there the lack of the invention". Mika Sasaki seems to have successfully liberated herself from this prejudice, or not even let herself become intimidated thereby. In any case, she presents us a selection of Clara Schumann's works for piano with all the necessary seriousness and unbridled virtuosity. The recording technique, which has captured the Steinway extremely dry, is a decisive factor in the extremely successful impression of the album, placing the piano almost in the private atmosphere of a salon occupied by only a few listeners. This atmosphere corresponds optimally with the mostly intimate compositions on the album Obsidian, which in any case do not belong in the large concert hall.

The physical proximity to Robert Schumann and the psychological proximity to Frédéric Chopin is reflected more or less clearly in the one and the other of the piano pieces. It is the very first piece of the album, the Scherzo in C minor that is in the sign of Chopin, while the Davidsbündler rave again and again through the two variation cycles each on a theme by Robert Schumann, the influence of the Davidsbündler being contrasted by highly individual inspirations of Clara Schumann herself. However, we are never confronted with plagiarisms of compositions by Chopin or Robert Schumann. Rather, Clara Schumann not surprisingly was more or less strongly inspired by their works, Chopin's works having belonged to the repertoire of the concert pianist Clara Schumann, who on the other hand witnessed the emergence of compositions by her husband, if not being the first to perform them. This inevitably shapes one's own work. For example, in the Préludes and Fugues Op. 16 the Préludes breath the bitter sweet fragrance of Chopin’s Préludes, while the Fugues are close to the Fugues of J.S. Bach, the composer of preludes and fugues per se.

In the three Romances op. 22, adorable miniatures for violin and piano, Petteri Livonen, an obviously splendid violinist, is partner of Mika Sasaki. Before the album finishes off wonderfully unagitated with the Notturno from the Soirées musicales Op.6, a reminiscence of Robert Schumann's Novelettes, Max Grafe steps in with his ten-minute emotions-laden, dramatically-tuned Obsidian Liturgy, which he wrote for Mika Sasaki on the occasion of the 120th and 160th birthday of Clara and Robert Schumann in 2016.

Obsidian is a great album which takes Clara Schumann as a composer seriously in a unique manner, bringing by its seriousness the astonished listener closer to an artistic personality which deserves to stick in the posterity’s memory as more than a pianist superstar of the nineteenth century and wife of Robert Schumann.

Mika Sasaki, piano
Petteri Iivonen, violin

Mika Sasaki & Petteri Iivonen - Obsidian: Mika Sasaki plays Clara Schumann

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