Christoph Spering - Schumann: Der Rose Pilgerfahrt, Requiem (2013) CD-Rip

With this pairing, Christoph Spering continues his exploration of some of the byways of the choral and vocal repertoire. Schumann’s choral music is desperately neglected, even by the standards of a composer who is still often misunderstood. That said, the two works recorded here don’t perhaps on paper present his best side.

Richard Wigmore has described Der Rose Pilgerfahrt (‘The Pilgrimage of the Rose’) as ‘German Romanticism at its most sickly sweet’ (3/11) and it is clear how the tale of a rose becoming human to experience love might appeal more to 19th-century sensibilities than to our own. Nevertheless, it’s a work of no little imagination and creativity, reminding the listener perhaps of the fairy music of Mendelssohn and containing a number of individual orchestral touches in addition to Schumann’s instinct as a song-writer. This recording seems to have originated in a recording made in a single day for broadcast; there are occasional moments where ensemble or balance might have been reconsidered given more time but all the same it offers a decent digital alternative to Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos’s more starrily cast 1974 recording, which also contains Bernard Klee’s 1983 recording of the Requiem.

The Requiem is perhaps not such a persuasive work and contains stretches where Schumann appears to have been less inspired by the wordy text: the over-long ‘Te decet’ after the atmospheric Introit, for example, or parts of the Sequence, which is a far cry from the fiery approach taken in certain better-known 19th-century settings and sprawls out before the more exciting Offertory. The Cologne chorus also seem to tire before the end of the final movement. Reassuring, though, that Schumann’s largely forgotten late style is being tackled with such seriousness of intent as here. The booklet contains the sung texts only in German and Latin.