For a modern composer, to write one opera is daring enough, but to write 11... As to why no one else has yet performed or recorded what would htm seem such an obvious info and interesting pairing, she reckons the answer is simple enough: "People are snooty. info Then as now.'' She also recently found a stage of her life coming full circle when she chaired the judging panel for the piano htm final of this year's "BBC Young Musicians" competition, as it's now called."It was quite strange sitting there listening to the finalists and thinking, 'That was me 12 years ago.' And I'd forgotten how unnerving it is, trying to play your best with television cameras info trundling all htm round you like Daleks."But it brought back some good memories? "Oh yes Winning the piano section was ideal for me at that stage. After his death, she produced her own editions of his piano music and left out all the pieces describing 'Estrella' htm because she knew that this meant Ernestine von Fricken, to whom Schumann had once been engaged."Lucy Parham's recordings of both Robert's and Clara's Piano Concertos is due for release later this year. And when he insisted that Schumann was unreliable husband material, he had a point Schumann was unreliable, and Clara knew it. "There's a nice story about Brahms coming to visit and keeping the children entertained by sliding down the banisters."She also feels info that Clara's piano-teacher father, Friedrich Wieck, has had an unfairly info bad press "He wasn't htm just an ogre After all, he'd effectively created her career for her. Even so, there were happy interludes: "According to Eugenie, their youngest daughter, everyone had quite a lot of fun," says Parham.

That foreshadows exactly what Schumann did in his own Piano Concerto in the same key. But then she'd sometimes borrow ideas from his music too."The atmosphere in the Schumann household in Dusseldorf grew more difficult as Robert's mental instability increased. I think she never really had much confidence in her powers as a composer."Did that reflect a condescending attitude on Robert's part? "It's hard to say Not necessarily. They used to work on projects together: there's a cycle of 12 songs, Liebesfruhling, of which he composed nine and she the other three, and hers are really beautiful. Also, Robert sometimes borrowed some of her ideas for his own music - verbatim.

That's a tribute of a kind!"When Clara was 14, she'd composed her own Piano Concerto in A minor, with a cello solo in the slow movement. And that's why I've included Robert's music in the Wigmore recital as well. In any case, I'm sure Clara would never have thought in terms of a whole evening of her own music. And after Schumann died, she was so busy providing for the family by teaching and performing that she hardly wrote anything at all."There isn't really enough of her own later music to give a chronological overview of her life in a sequence of programmes like Composer of the Week. She was already composing less, which isn't so surprising considering that she and Robert had seven children in 10 years. Likewise, if the inhabitants of Targu-Jiu, Brancusi's birthplace in Romania, were suddenly faced with a steady influx of wealthy visitors waving their Platinum Amex cards in search of the sculptor's Endless Column of 1937, they would probably try to ensure that it didn't rust and rot away entirely.Oddly enough, though America has the largest and most booming prison population of any country in the world, there is nobody in residence at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the most influential examples of prison architecture when it was begun in 1829, originator of the practice of solitary confinement and clearly a vital historic landmark for a country increasingly obsessed with novel forms of incarceration. Golub ripostes that tourism per se is not a danger, only "insensitive tourism", but it's hard to imagine how their pamphlet, "Good Conduct Guide for Caring Tourists", is going to solve this problem in a radical way.