Join the Friends of Music!

This CD presents two of the finest chamber works by Clara and Robert Schumann, whose sixteen-year-long marriage was the commingling of the shared musical experience, complimentary creative requirements, and physical and emotional dependencies of two of Germany’s finest Romantic-era musicians. Created within a year of each other, the two trios on this disk were frequently paired on 19th-century concert programs. While most present-day discussions of Robert Schumann’s D minor trio point out the difficulty of balancing the active piano part against the strings, just as most descriptions of his symphonies mention their “thick,” “turgid,” or “opaque” instrumentation, the Castle Trio avoids such issues by using instruments similar to those available to the Schumanns: a parallel-strung J. B. Streicher piano of 1846, and gut-strung violin (Andrea Guarneri, 1670) and cello (Carlo Antonio Testore, ca. 1730).