Sofja Gulbadamova's recording of a total of 14 Humoresques by the composers Edvard Grieg, Max Reger, Antonin Dvorak and Robert Schumann demonstrate the very wide range that music bearing this title could have in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. While the literary humoresque was a popular and entertaining, relatively short-lived "Biedermeier-style narrative form" (Appel), musical humoresques covered a whole range of forms – from the small-scale to the large-scale, multi-part format, from the amusing and lively through to the enigmatic and ambiguous. Be prepared for contrasts, exaggerations, the OTT and the seemingly incompatible, for pieces that can cause you to laugh or indeed to cry, and which plumb the depths of the abysmal, the desperate and the gloomy – music that speaks both directly and sometimes between the lines.
