Double Concerto / Cello Concerto in A Minor

"Kaler and Kliegel make the most of the Hungarian elements in Brahms's score, and Constantine and his Irish orchestra find some nice moments in orchestral writing. Altogether it is a natural-sounding reading with some fine playing. And the price is right."
- ARG December 1995

"There are not many versions of the Brahms more warmly appealing than this"
- Gramophone

"a warmly spontaneous-sounding performance very-well recorded"
- Penguin Guide

Robert Schumann must seem in many ways typical of the age in which he lived, combining a number of the principal characteristics of Romanticism in his music and in his life. Born in Zwickau in 1810, the son of a bookseller, publisher and writer, he showed an early interest in literature, and was to make a name for himself in later years as a writer and editor of the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, a journal launched in 1834.

After a period at university, to satisfy the ambitions of his widowed mother, while still showing the wide interests of a dilettante, Schumann turned more fully to music under the tuition of Friedrich Wieck, a famous teacher whose energies had been largely directed towards the training of his daughter Clara, a pianist of prodigious early talent. The romance that led in 1840 to their marriage, in spite of the bitter opposition of Wieck, was followed by a period in which Clara's career as a pianist had, in some way, to be reconciled with her husband's ambitions and the demands of a growing family. A weakness in the fingers had caused Schumann to give up the idea of becoming a virtuoso pianist, but he drew attention as a writer on musical matters and, increasingly, as a composer. His final position in Düsseldorf as director of music was not successful, however, and culminated in an attempt at suicide, insanity and death in 1856.