This year marks the bicentennial of Robert Schumann’s birth and has brought with it many concerts, festivals, and recordings. His father was a publisher, and Schumann was an avid reader as a child.

I made a U-turn with this CD. The first time through, I didn’t like it at all. The period-instrument players of the Benvenue Fortepiano Trio — violinist Monica Huggett, cellist Tanya Tomkins, and ...

The poet James Fenton has written about the purity and intensity of joy we experience as young children through activities as simple as dancing, jumping, and singing. There is a kind of mercy, he says ...