Few musical marriages would be able to provide the two composers of a song programme, even fewer have a story worth planning a concert around - but the partnership between Robert and Clara Schumann was something special. Pianist Roger Vignoles opened just such a pair of concerts last week in recital with baritone Wolfgang Holzmair; here he teamed up with mezzo Bernarda Fink, pianist Imogen Cooper and the Kungsbacka Trio for a gentle shake-up of the usual concert format.
From an early note by the minxish Clara suggesting Robert stay off the beer to his sad letter sending love to the children in a rare moment of clarity late in his life, a wealth of correspondence and journal entries survive chronicling the Schumanns' relationship - first flirtations, Clara's father's objections, their legal battle to marry without his consent, their heyday as linchpins of the forward-looking musical world, and then, tragically, Robert's hospitalisation, madness and eventual death from syphilis.
Juliet Stevenson's readings, from a candlelit chair at the side, brought extracts from this vividly alive, her narration linking songs and chamber pieces mostly by Robert, along with a handful by Clara or their friends, Mendelssohn and Brahms.
Cooper started things off with pieces from Robert's Carnaval, which could sound scrambled, but she compensated with a perfectly judged reading of Traumerei. Fink's expressive, honest mezzo put the songs across movingly, with an extra gleam higher up. Vignoles was her pianist, Cooper the piano soloist; but they combined for the two-piano Study in A Flat to open the second half with an apt depiction of the Schumanns' wedded bliss.
Not all the pieces were so well chosen, and the first movement of the Violin Sonata No 1, though performed with passion by Malin Broman and Simon Crawford-Phillips of the Kungsbacka Trio, seemed drafted in as handy expression of Robert's rage. Yet elsewhere the readings and music were each other's ideal illustration. This was nowhere more apparent than in Fink's delivery of Robert's 1850 song Requiem, which brought the evening to a touching close.
