If you could go to only one more concert, what would it be?

David K. Nelson says:

Edgar, Nathan Milstein was indeed related to the highly regarded Hollywood director Lewis (yes) Milestone. All Quiet on the Western Front is likely his most famous movie, and Nathan M actually visited the set as it was being filmed, but he made many famous ones right into the 1960s. He also directed some well known television programs such as Have Gun Will Travel. Based on photos there is a family resemblance between the two men.

Horowitz, Milstein and Piatigorsky played a trio performance in New York in 1932. No recording, alas.

There are three Schumann sonatas for keyboard and violin, although I have seen CDs that claim to contain “the” Schumann sonatas and have only the first two.

There are many fine violinists who have more or less ignored the Schumann sonatas, or perhaps it is fairer to say, their record companies ignored the Schumann sonatas so they do not appear in the discographies even of artists who play them, such as Milstein according to Tom, above, and the third is the most ignored of all.

There are many beauties in the music but as was so often the case, Schumann sometimes asked the violin to do things that from a notation standpoint make sense on the keyboard but do not translate well to violin, and to a violin trying to interact with keyboard more particularly.

The last movement of the Sonata No. 2 is what I am particularly thinking of. This is a BIG sonata by the way, with big ideas and gestures. The young Menuhin memorably recorded the Sonata No. 2 in d minor op. 121 with Hephzibah on 78s and if you can find it, I think you’ll enjoy it. But note how gimpy-legged that third movement can sound.

For the first Sonata in a minor op. 105 I usually select Max Rostal/Colin Horsley, reissued on CD on the Symposium label, not easy to find now. I happen to like Rostal’s circa 1957 violin playing more than some reviewers do or did. Probably easier to find will be Perlman/Argerich. It is a lovely but curious piece, ending in a movement which just does not feel like a finale but rather like the scherzo that comes before a finale. I wonder how many concert performances end awkwardly – the musicians somehow need to convey “you can applaud now, thank you. It’s over.”

The third sonata gets a mixed reception, but I happen to enjoy hearing it (I have never seen the sheet music). To be fair it does have a vague air that Schumann was rethinking some things in the first two sonatas – so it is like a revision of an imaginary original.

Schumann contributed movements to the “group effort” F-A-E sonata that he, Brahms and Dietrich composed as a guessing game at a “welcome back” party for their friend Joseph Joachim. Brahms’s exciting Scherzo (“Sonatensatz”) is often played now but Brahms himself did nothing with it and Joachim retained the music and only had it published well after Brahms’s death (tellingly, he did not have the Schumann movements published). But Schumann used his two movements (and intermezzo and finale) and filled them out with new music to create a complete sonata. For some reason this re-use of the party music, or perhaps the fact that the third sonata was one of those works that was “put away” until about a century after Schumann’s death) has made some people regard that third sonata as a sort of bastard child.

For all three Schumann sonatas I have not been keeping good track of more recent recordings, but back when I was a reviewer I liked Mark Kaplan and Anton Kuerti on the Arabesque label.

I remember bringing in the first two Schumann sonatas to my lessons but my teacher admitted that he had never worked on them with any of this famed teachers (Gingold, Piastro, Guilet, Chausow) and did not even have a listening familiarity with them. As a result his suggested fingerings and bowings were purely academic and etude like, and since I could never find a pianist willing to tackle them, I have never been able to arrive at my own way of playing them.