Schumann: Novelletten & Nachtstücke

In this new album Danny Driver brings his impeccable pianism, consummate style and imagination to Schumann’s Novelletten and Nachtstücke, less well-known sets from his extraordinary output for the piano.

Schumann wrote Nachtstücke, a set of four character pieces, upon the death of his brother, and would have entitled it ‘Corpse Fantasia’ were it not for Clara’s intervention. The eight pieces of the Novelletten form what is at once the largest and the least known among Schumann’s major piano cycles. The music itself is of consistently high quality (years later, Schumann himself still regarded this among his most successful works), and clearly written in an exultant mood.

CDA67983  70 minutes 34 seconds
‘The bravura writing has to be savoured, and there's a lot of it, as well as the unremitting rhythmic energy. And many of the pages are to be counted among Schumann's most inventively complex in their ...
The Daily Telegraph
The Guardian