When Brahms ironically defined it as a “very boisterous potpourri of student drinking songs à la [Franz von] Suppé” he probably hardly expected this Academic Festival Overture for a large orchestra to meet with such success. Composed in the summer of 1880, it is pure entertainment, a quodlibet in four sections linking student-song themes in an unbroken chain, freely and rhapsodically designed like a “non-academic” sonata bursting with irresistible, serene fun. In a parodying tribute to the apprentices motive from Wagner’s Mastersingers Brahms cooks up a rich mix of means of expression, with a symphony orchestra plus triangle, cymbals, and bass drum, giving the cheerful, light-hearted feel of a band.
Schumann’s Concerto op. 54 has quite a different emotional impact. He started it in 1841, in a moment of prolific output, when his life was less tormented as a result of his joyful union with Clara. Until then he had composed almost only piano solos, chamber music and Lieder, and he was anxious abut this Concerto, writing that he realized he could not write a concerto for a virtuoso performer, so he had to think up something else, half-way between a symphony, a concerto and a full-scale sonata. The outcome was the first movement – Allegro for piano and orchestra entitled Phantasie – and only in 1845 did he complete the composition. While critics accused it of “scant virtuosism” (devoted as they were to Liszt’s crowded decorative style) and derided it as a “concerto without a piano” its thematic freshness, and the quality and generosity of the musical inventive possibly make it the most romantic and formally balanced of piano concertos.
It is striking that only a few years earlier, in 1839, while Schumann was in Vienna visiting Franz Schubert’s brother, he unearthed – among a pile of manuscripts forgotten in a drawer – Schubert’s imposing Symphony in C major (dated 1828, the year the composer died). Schumann was impressed by the powerful tension that built up as the piece moved forward and the transformation of the means of expression in a new formal concept. He insisted that “anyone who does not know this Symphony knows even less about Schubert; and this praise may seem hard to believe when you think of all that Schubert has already given to Art. Here is life in all its fibres, colours shading to the finest hues, and there is significance throughout. This symphony affected me like none other, even Beethoven’s.”

Federico Scoponi