Pupils Of Clara Schumann, 9 LP Box Set, RARE, NM, Pearl Records

	£		55
	$		73

Pupils Of Clara Schumann, 9 LP Box Set

Pearl Records,

Records look unplayed, spot tested and they play Excellent - these are historic recordings from the earliest days of recorded music so the transfer quality is not high. I guess you know this if you have read this far.

Box is generally very good two corners show some damage. Booklet is in Excellent condition.

This review from Grammophone

https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/pupils-of-clara-schumann

Over many years now Pearl have provided us with an abundance of important historical issues—but none more significant than this, I feel. For, to use a painting analogy, not only have some of these performances been retrieved from storage, cleaned and put back on view in new frames, they have been rescued from irretrievable deterioration with the same care and devotion which picture restorers will bring to a fine work of art.
But to start at the beginning. The beginning, chronologically, comes from the dawn of recorded sound. The Brahms cylinder had deteriorated badly before what remained was copied, many years ago. So through a fierce sotrm of background noise we can just hear Brahms say a few words as an introduction to the half-hidden sound of his playing: several hearings are needed before the music takes any shape. Brahms was a friend rather than a pupil of Clara Schumann and that friendship extended to Clara's pupils, as is revealed in Ilona Eibenschutz's fascinating reminiscences of the great composer. Eibenschutz's only commercial recordings, made in 1903, convey a vivid impression of a brilliant artist who enjoyed a formidable reputation on the concert platform before her marriage and consequent retirement. But, alas, few copies of the originals survive and those that do are obviously not in good condition. From Eibenschutz's later years we have several private recordings where the sound, inevitably, is variable in quality. Her playing is always full of interest and the Brahms and Schumann items are particularly illuminating, yet a collection of short pieces such as this cannot quite give us a rounded picture of the artist and her teacher in the way that the legacy of just three recordings made by Fanny Davies clearly does.
Schumann's Piano Concerto is given a wonderfully vital and expressive performance by Fanny Davies, of a kind which you will just not hear in modern performances, faithful to the spirit and letter of the score and full of revelatory detail. In the first movement, for example, Davies observes the ritardando direction at bar 111 very subtly so as not to hold up the flow of the music. Thus she can immediately resume the basic tempo at bar 112, marked a tempo, animato: she plays the accompanying quavers with a firm, rocking rhythm which gives the music a lively forward momentum, but there is freedom enough within that rhythm for the right hand to sing the melodic line with the most graceful, heartfelt phrasing. The second movement is played simply and directly; it is the conversation between soloist and orchestra Clara Schumann said it should be, uncluttered by hesitations or over-expression and with a quietly eloquent strength and integrity which are deeply moving. The third movement is equally telling, played as directed by Clara Schumann at a steady, unhurried waltz-like tempo and full of poetic insights.
In the Davidsbundlertanze, slightly cut, Davies's use of clearly related tempos makes the work very much all of a piece rather than a sequence of episodes; her buoyant use of rhythm and accents give the music great vitality, yet within the basic pulses there is room for the most affecting beauty of phrase. Here, as in the Kinderszenen, there is both strength and poetry of a high order and an absolute sense of rightness. Denis Hall has transferred the three original 78rpm sets marvellously well: he could do little about the confined orchestral sound in the Concerto, which like the originals is a little bass heavy, but the piano tone, particularly in the Davidsbundlertanze, is very good.
The bulk of this set contains almost all the recordings made by Adelina de Lara: in cases where more than one version of a work exists the better performance has been chosen. I think it particularly important to define exactly what these recordings are, for they are all real performances captured on early tape machines, some works played at a Wigmore Hall public recital, others recorded in a studio, where time and expense dictated that a day-long session would consist of several works played through without repetition and with few breaks between. If this was scarcely an ideal way to record an 80-year-old lady pianist we must be eternally thankful to Michael Thomas that he persuaded de Lara to play for the microphone, for her performances provide a great insight into the Clara Schumann tradition.
Although the old lady still had a formidable technique it has to be said that not one of these performances is free from slips of the fingers. In some works there are few blemishes, in others there are more serious lapses. Yet I have known some of the records for many years, and the more I hear them the less the mistakes matter and the more I am aware of de Lara's strength and poetry, her love for the music and her veneration of its tradition through Clara. Throughout a long life which had more than its share of misfortunes—they effectively prevented the career Fanny Davies enjoyed—Adelina de Lara preserved a nineteenth-century style of playing into the second half of the twentieth century: it is an astonishing fact that most of the Schumann works she plays here had been taught her by the woman who influenced their composition well over a century earlier. Her remarkable Brahms performances are equally authentic: the Scherzo, Op. 4 she even learned from the composer himself when he visited Clara Schumann. There is a striking similarity between her performance of the Davidsbundlertanze and that of Fanny Davies: Davies was a slightly more mercurial player, de Lara at 80 a little more emphatic and angular. Her use of rhythm and pulse was similar, her phrasing was possessed of a similar quiet beauty and she made the inner voices sing out in just the same way, chords sometimes spread to enhance the music's flow and argument, everything built on a firm and sonorous bass line. As Jerrold Northrop Moore writes in his copious and scholarly notes for this box, ''The palpable similarities among the Schumann pupils prove as nothing else could prove that we are indeed listening to the authentic echoes of their teacher, and through her, of the music she inspired.''
Somehow the de Lara tapes have been made to yield a quality of sound which will surprise those who are familiar with the original issues, with their wooden bass and curiously screechy treble. In some works, such as Kinderszenen, the quality is now of good early mono-LP standard. elsewhere the sound is not quite so good, though much improved, and occasionally there is evidence that the available tapes had already deteriorated a little. Yet practically all have been saved in time and the careful work of restoration I referred to earlier has ensured that de Lara's playing is now well preserved for posterity. Meanwhile, today's collectors are fortunate to have this legacy made a available to them in such an elegantly produced edition.'