Hobson wraps epic Schumann journey on a high note with “Davidsbündlertanze”
Ian Hobson’s multi-year project of performing Robert Schumann’s complete piano music came to an end Friday evening at the Tenri Cultural Institute. Begun in 2018 and interrupted by the Covid pandemic, the finale comprised two of the composer’s earliest pieces, Piano Sonata No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 11, and the Davidsbündlertanze, Op. 6.
The series was never in chronological order. The penultimate concert of Schumann’s sonatas for violin and piano was played in reverse order, as was this one. It emphasized that what Hobson has been doing has been less about narrating Schumann’s history than in exploring who he was as an artist and understanding him. That is one of the highest goals of a musician playing the scores of a composer from the past, and it’s one that Hobson reached Friday, at least in part.
The Sonata in the first half was a mix of concentrated and distracted playing. Hobson pointed out to the crowd that he was leaving the piano lid closed—he is a high volume player and Tenri is an acutely live space—and also hinted that the instrument was not at its best.
Indeed, the listener noted a jangly quality to the piano. This wasn’t unpleasant, rather there was a patina of another era that felt right for the music. Perhaps it was a frustration for Hobson, but the uneven performance of the sonata seems to have another cause, which was the pianist’s trademark intensity. For him, that’s not so much a mix of loud and fast, but what can feel like such a headlong drive through the music that details get cast aside for a single-minded goal.
That feeling waxed and waned. The issue was musical space. Despite the density of Schumann’s ideas, there are key moments where a phrase ends and there’s a moment to prepare for the next, or an inner dialogue rises out of a thick texture. Hobson took a breath for some of these—like the little melody in the first movement that takes a brief rest as it passes from hand to hand. But other times he seemed so focused on moving things down the road that he didn’t fully articulate the music.
This never felt like a technical issue, and perfection is far less important than saying something. It was more that what Hobson had to say in the sonata grew increasingly monochromatic in the first movement, so he ran over the details.
He was best in the second movement Aria, the intriguingly marked “Senza passione, ma espressivo.” Here Hobson’s emotional balance was excellent, a precise position between weight of feeling and relaxed affect. Schumann’s marking perhaps forces the musician to focus exactly on the details here, and nothing more.
His uneven view returned in the final two movements. The slow intermezzo in the Scherzo was singing—as was the slow introduction to the whole sonata—but anything faster and Hobson again plowed through the music.
The balance he found in the Aria seemed the key Hobson found to Schumann. Balance is indeed a key to the composer’s biography, the dopplegängers Florestan and Eusebius he used to describe his different ways of thinking, themselves likely shadows of his mental illness. It is their Schumann channeled voices as characters in Davisbündlertanze.
Hobson played the sections and differentiated the characters with exceptional clarity and subtlety. This marked how a fine technique such as his can become irrelevant. It was his thinking that mattered.
In the opening “Lebhaft,” he moved smoothly between a jauntiness for Florestan and legato playing for Eusebius, while still playing the section as an integrated whole. This had one expecting great things, which Hobson delivered. Each Florestan section was full of life and energy, and also poise, forthright but not overdone. The germ that first rises in “Etwas hahnbüchen” and later returns several times was clearly marked but not obtrusive, “Sehr rasch” was exuberant and clear-eyed.
The Eusebius music, meanwhile, had great warmth, with wonderful lyricism in “Innig” and a sublime “Einfach.” And always, most impressive, was the contrasts within integration in “Wild und lustig” and “Frisch,” music that, by bringing together two of his voices, made Schumann whole.
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