Friday Performance Pick - 192 : Professor Carol

Schumann, Kinderszenen, Op. 15

Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) consists of 13 short character pieces. Because they are not especially demanding technically, you might assume they were written for children to play or for young audiences. And actually, they attracted me at a young age when I had just enough facility at the piano to get through some of them. But they are not really intended for children.

The Kinderszenen are a touching tribute to the eternal, universal memories and feelings of childhood from a nostalgic adult perspective; unlike a number of Schumann’s collections of piano character pieces (e.g. Album for the Young, Op. 68), the Kinderszenen are not intended to be played by children. – Blair Johnston

Well, I didn’t know they weren’t for me, and I would not have cared. But Johnston is right.

In 1986, the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz returned to his Russian homeland for the first time in 61 years to play a concert at the Moscow Conservatory. Horowitz had emigrated to the West in 1925 after gaining prominence in Soviet Russia, so the event was weighted with political and personal significance.

I recall watching the televised concert at the time (well into my own adulthood). As an encore, Horowitz played “Träumerei” from Kinderszenen. The audience reactions seem to me the best confirmation that the work evokes nostalgic memories of childhood. I often get irritated at too many audience shots (when you attend concerts you don’t look around and study the faces of your neighbors in the audience). But occasionally it makes a point.

You can watch that short encore on YouTube or even find a link to the entire concert posted by Medici TV. But I think you will gain much more from the entire set of 13 pieces, and so I am posting this performance by Anna Vinnitskaya.