Happy Birthday, Schumann!

I hate to choose a melancholy piece for the occasion, but Schumann's first Dawn Song is a thing of too achingly unique beauty, a testament to the blossoming of his music's jagged, heartfelt weirdness in his last days, and pianist Jean Martin takes right to his heart Debussy's definition of music as the silence between the notes. The first ever pianist to record these pieces, he plays with such breathtaking reverence that it sent chills across my body after just the first few notes- and that's after having known and loved many fine recordings such as Uchida's or Ugorski's, who all suddenly seem like they're rushing...

I cannot resist the temptation to quote Emily Dickinson again:

'If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?'

In case that left you a little too dewy-eyed (and if it didn't, er, farewell), here, as a counterweight, is Rubinstein's wonderfully unpretentious, aristocratic and finely shaded performance of the Symphonic Etudes, my second-favourite work of Schumann's- a quirky, bubbling, creature (I have a particularly soft spot for the weird-ass 3rd study)...