Clara Wieck Schumann (1819 96) championed the piano works of her husband, Robert, and her close friend, Johannes Brahms, plus Bach, Beethoven and others. At the height of her fame her playing was hailed for its nobility and eloquence, her name invoked alongside those of Liszt and Thalberg. A greatly talented composer as well, she inspired about 30 fellow composers to dedicate works to her. Swiss pianist Kathrin Schmidlin offers a balanced conspectus of those compositions, featuring many partially forgotten and overlooked character pieces.

To be sure, they are of inconsistent quality. Schmidlin saves some of the best for last, notably Smetana’s Four Sketches. I especially enjoyed ‘Souvenir’ and ‘Persistent Endeavour’ with their inventive counterpoint and distinctive voice. Another attractive morsel on the album is Brahms’s charming Gavotte on a theme from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide.

I wish that Schmidlin had replaced Robert Schumann’s late Ghost Variations with his earlier and much finer Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck, Op 5, also dedicated to Clara. (The theme was written by Clara when she was 14 years old.) This deeply poetic and wonderfully imaginative work is still rarely performed and recorded. All of Robert Schumann’s greatest piano music was written before he was 30, but the Ghost Variations was the last piece he wrote for piano, years later, just before his admission to the asylum in Endenich. Schmidlin skilfully navigates its unwieldly textures, quirky rhythms and gnomic rhetoric but the spark of Robert Schumann’s genius had nearly been extinguished. [..]

Gramophone Magazine, Stephen Cera, September 2025

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