Rattle and Faust Revive Neglected Schumann at Proms — SkimNews
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- Simon Rattle conducted the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra in an all-Schumann Proms evening built around three 'problem' works: the overture to the failed opera Genoveva, the Violin Concerto, and Symphony No. 2.
- Isabelle Faust delivered only the sixth Proms performance of Schumann's Violin Concerto — a stark contrast to the 103rd outing of Dvořák's New World Symphony the previous night.
- The Genoveva overture opened moodily, with the Freiburgers' horn quartet drawing listeners in through musical storytelling rather than sheer volume, in a reading closer to Mendelssohn than Wagner.
- Faust navigated the concerto's technical demands with dynamic shading, delicate trills, and subtle rubato, while Rattle — conducting without a podium — leaned into the first movement's dark urgency as her attentive partner.
- Rattle's reading of Symphony No. 2 refused to wallow, balancing the opening movement's gloom with sunshine, spotlighting the obsessive nature of the scherzo's nagging theme before a celebratory finale.
- The review praised the period-instrument blend as never blurring or smudging, despite the Royal Albert Hall acoustic being 'hardly conducive' to soft-grained period tones — exceptional playing the reviewer called it.
- Schumann's Violin Concerto was locked away by his executors for roughly a century after its premiere, deemed so disappointing that it was effectively suppressed — a context the concert implicitly pushes back against.
Why it matters: For classical-music audiences and programmers, the evening made a live case that long-shunned Schumann works can shine under period-instrument advocacy and committed soloists. The six-versus-103 Proms performance gap exposes how unevenly the Romantic canon is programmed — a single concert won't fix that imbalance, but it gives promoters and conductors evidence to book this repertoire more often.
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