In the year of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Robert Schumann, the internationally renowned Norwegian pianist Liv Glaser pays her own tribute in which she performs music from two of the composer’s most endearing piano sets, the ‘Kinderszenen’ (Scenes from Childhood) and ‘Album for the Young’. The recording was made using her 1830 Hafner fortepiano.
Celebrating her 75th birthday this year, as well as 50 years since her debut concert, Liv Glaser continues her musical endeavours with the same strength as ever. Some 20 years ago she started studies of original instruments and performance practice with Malcolm Bilson. The result has been several critically acclaimed recordings of such composers as Mozart, Clementi, Schubert and Grieg. As a little girl in a family of professional musicians, Liv Glaser came to know and love Schumann’s work at an early age. Many of the pieces in “Album for the Young” Schumann wrote for his eldest daughter’s seventh birthday. Written to be played by children, each of the small pieces tells its own little story.
After receiving his beloved Clara’s enthusiastic reaction to Kinderszenen, Schumann wrote back: ‘What I in all modesty have invented, maybe one day will become our reality’. These words reveal that Schumann not only looked upon this music as a recollection of childhood, but perhaps to an even greater extent as a dream of their life together in the future, a dream which came true when Robert and Clara married in 1840, the year after the publication of Kinderszenen.
