The Strad Recommends: Alina Ibragimova: Schumann

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: March 2025

Description: A long-standing partnership finds revelatory riches in Schumann

Musicians: Alina Ibragimova (violin) Cédric Tiberghien (piano)

Works: Schumann: Violin Sonatas nos.1–3

Catalogue number: HYPERION CDA68354

This is Schumann revived and illuminated in exemplary modern style. The mellow, covered tone of Tiberghien’s Bechstein is as central to the overall success of the enterprise as the vulnerable, confidential feel to Ibragimova’s phrasing.

Rather than laying into the First Sonata’s opening movement with the usual heroic–Romantic rhetoric, they bring down the heat and the volume a notch. Both musicians give each other time: for Tiberghien to spread and lean into chords, and for Ibragimova to soar over cadences. Yet there is nothing fey about the spirit of the 18th century evoked in the Allegretto. Indeed, the struggle between head and heart – so central to Schumann’s translation of Beethoven into his own aesthetic – courses through all three opening movements and especially the Third.

It would be idle to deny that the Third operates at a lower wattage of invention to the other two. But this partnership’s deceptively straightforward sensibility pays off in the parlour-recital charm of the inner movements.

Competition on record is stiffer in the Second, painted as it is by Schumann with a broader brush in emulation of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’. Yet here, too, Ibragimova and Tiberghien distinguish themselves with an attention to the score that should satisfy pedants and dreamers alike. Especially captivating is the contrast they draw between nobility and something nasty in the woodshed in the slow movement. Notwithstanding the special, nervous intensity of Busch and Serkin in this music, I will find it hard to hear these sonatas another way after Ibragimova and Tiberghien.

PETER QUANTRILL