Emmanuel Music offers rare Schumann

In 1989 Emmanuel Music launched a series of 12 concerts to perform all the songs of Robert Schumann. It was the first entry in what has evolved into the group's Chamber Series, a kind of deep immersion in one realm of a composer's output. Further series have been devoted to Brahms, Debussy, and John Harbison, and in 2003 the Emmanuel musicians completed a seven-year cycle of the complete piano, vocal, and chamber music of Schubert.

That projects like these are now an integral part of Boston's musical life shouldn't obscure just how unusual they are. The opportunity to explore a single composer's output in its totality -- and to do so with Emmanuel's marvelous singers and instrumentalists as one's guide -- is both rare and valuable.

Now Emmanuel is back in Schumann territory again: It's in the third year of a five-year project covering the piano, chamber, and vocal works. This season's final concerts in the series are scheduled for the next three Sunday afternoons.

A hallmark of Chamber Series concerts is encountering familiar fare with lesser-known, and sometimes quite obscure, works. That's especially so when it comes to Schumann's songs. Only a small cross section of his lieder are common currency in recitals and recordings, and a lot of attention is lavished on a few big song cycles, such as "Dichterliebe" ("The Poet's Love") and "Frauenliebe and Leben" ("A Woman's Life and Love").

By contrast, Emmanuel's programs for the next three concerts feature rarely heard songs that Schumann wrote toward the end of his career. One notable entry on the March 11 program is a set of five songs written on poems by Mary Stuart (better known as Mary Queen of Scots). They are startlingly direct and unsettling, more austere in their sound than earlier fare, yet no less emotionally compelling. Mixing them with one of Schumann's last chamber music works, the Piano Trio in G Minor, and the youthful "Abegg" Variations (his Op. 1) should make for intriguing listening.

One very curious piece is receiving its Boston debut: "Der Rose Pilgerfahrt." ("The Pilgrimage of the Rose") It's a sort of musical fairy tale, the main character of which is a rose that becomes a human princess and eventually an angel. It's rather folksy and whimsical, and the music has an appropriately childlike aspect. But as the late John Daverio pointed out in his indispensable Schumann book, its themes of transformation and the journey from the earthly to the spiritual realm have a lot in common with some of Schumann's more serious, larger-scale works such as the "Scenes from Goethe's Faust."

You may think it strange that a piece like "Der Rose" is only now being heard in Boston, 156 years after it was written. Keep in mind, though, that in 2005 Emmanuel gave Schumann's lone opera "Genoveva" what was probably its first American performance. Who knows when or whether you'll have the chance to hear them again?

At Emmanuel Church this Sunday, March 11 , and March 18. 617-536-3356 , emmanuelmusic.org

The Metropolitan Opera announced its 2007-08 season this week, remarkable for the prevalence of new productions, seven in all. But it's also notable because Met music director James Levine will conduct only 33 performances of four operas: Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor," Verdi's "Macbeth," Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," and Puccini's "Manon Lescaut." Not counting last season, when Levine missed time with a rotator-cuff injury, next season will be Levine's lightest workload at the Met since the mid-1970s, according to the Associated Press.

Levine told the AP that the slimmed-down schedule is an anomaly, saying that he had been "fooling with a sabbatical." However, during an acceptance speech for an Opera News award in January, he mentioned the need to cut back on his schedule. "To do it without losing the continuity is tricky," he said then. "I have time to actually to try and take care of myself, a concept which I never, ever understood."