The relationship of Clara Schumann's music to that of her more famous husband is curious. Her works for the most part do not sound much like Robert's except in the most general way; at times she harks back to Mendelssohn's gentle lyricism, and her absorption of Chopin, as compared with that of her husband's, is oriented less toward daring smudges of harmonic color and more toward pianism -- she was, after all, the pianist in the family, Robert's promising career having been destroyed by a ridiculous splint device he wore in hopes of strengthening his fingers. Yet her compositional career seems strangely linked to Robert Schumann's. After his death, when she both had unfettered creative freedom and needed the money, she wrote no more. And Clara, like Robert, tended to move from one genre to another over time rather than working on different kinds of music at the same time; she had a piano-miniature period, a song period, and a chamber period.
All of these have been taken into account by pianist Micaela Gelius and her violin and cello collaborators on this collection of Clara Schumann's piano and chamber music. Put together with an album of her songs (there are none included here), it would make a good introduction to her music. The Trio in G minor, Op. 17, ends the album as it should; this compact but deeply lyrical trio, written while Schumann had four small children in the house and a husband who hogged the piano, is her masterwork. Gelius excels in the lighter piano miniatures and in the Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 20, a work with interesting biographical resonances -- Brahms, with whom Clara had a furious but apparently unconsummated affair, wrote a set of variations on the same theme. The album throughout makes a good case for Clara Schumann as a distinctive talent; pick it up with confidence as a first step in getting to know her music, or as an excellent resource for "guess the composer" games.
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