Post tease: A special artist finds her way into our Brahms piano party

Imogen Cooper (as of June "Dame Imogen")  [photo by Benjamin Ealovega]

SCHUMANN: Humoreske, Op. 20: opening movements --
i. Einfach (Simple) -- Sehr rasch und leicht (Very quick and light)
ii. Hastig (Hurried) [at 4:28]


Imogen Cooper, piano. BBC Music Magazine, recorded live in Wigmore Hall, London, May 28, 1994

by Ken

It's funny how things come together. As I'm going to explain in the main post, when I started thinking about Imogen Cooper, it had nothing to do, at least nothing directly to do, with our present exploration of Brahms's path to and through the intermezzo genre (most recent installment: Wednesday's "'It's a gift' (cont.): A bit more about operatic intermezzos, and a lot more about 19th-century-style instrumental ones"). And then, somehow, it did. With a minimum of intention on my part, it practically crashed into our Brahms piano party.

When we get to something more like a proper post, you're going to be presented with something I happen to have written a few days ago recalling the experience of picking up almost much at random a CD I've had for goodness-knows-how-long, "of several sets of short piano pieces by Schumann and Brahms played by Imogen Cooper -- a British pianist I've always enjoyed, having first encountered her on records as a song accompanist, and such a good one that she grabbed my attention." After which --

I fired the disc up, starting with Schumann's Humoreske, a suite of humoresques, and from the first note there it was: the direct outreach of a human spirit reaching out to whoever might be at the other end of the electronic pathway. It was the very thing, I realized, that had attracted me in everything I'd heard her play."

And those opening numbers of Schumann's Op. 20 we've just heard are the very thing I heard.


SO HOW DID THIS COME TO CONCERN US TODAY?

Well, those "several sets of short piano pieces by Schumann and Brahms" contained on the CD in question are Schumann's Humoreske and Kreisleriana, surrounding one of those late sets of short Brahms piano pieces the composer assembled as his Opp. 116-19, specifically the Seven Fantasias, Op. 116. You may recall that among the 20 pieces contained in these four sets there are no fewer than 14 intermezzos, and four of them are interspersed with three capriccios to make up the Seven Fantasias of Op. 116. Like, for example, this one:

BRAHMS: Intermezzo in A minor, Op. 116, No. 2


Imogen Cooper, piano. BBC Music Magazine, recorded live in Wigmore Hall, London, May 28, 1994

And by golly, here too I hear "the direct outreach of a human spirit reaching out to whoever might be at the other end of the electronic pathway," except that, as you've noticed, these were live performances, and while they were also captured by BBC microphones for broadcast, the performer had a more immediate target for her communicative outreach: that Wigmore Hall audience. (For the record, on her website, under the heading "Recordings: Live v. Studio," Dame Imogen says: "I have always wanted to record more live. The real test of an artist's strength of conviction and capacity to convey this conviction with inspiration is on the stage.")


SO HERE'S THE PLAN --

With some trepidation I want to share with you the thing I wrote this week about Imogen Cooper, and let you hear some more of her playing: more Brahms (I'm thinking both capriccios and intermezzos), a couple of the song recordings which were my first exposure to her playing, and a couple of Mozart concerto movements (live performances in which she conducts from the keyboard). Stay tuned.

Or maybe we'll settle for some further post-teasing.

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