On May 20th, 1896, Clara Schumann died within a few months of her seventy-seventh birthday. So this disc comes as a timely centenary tribute in miniatures extending from the naively decorative, virtuoso-type Romance variee, Op. 3 (already dedicated, at the age of 13 to her adored Robert) to her last solo keyboard work, a tender Romance written for Brahms during dark days of Robert’s illness and death.
I was glad to find “Le Ballet des Revenants” (the last of her Quatre Pieces caracteristiques, Op. 5), so daring in its macabre mischief for one still barely 16. It was equally good to renew acquaintance with her Three Preludes and Fugues, Op. 16; surely no 26-year-old wife and mother (and sharer of her husband’s own recent Bach studies) could have combined keyboard charm with more contrapuntal skill. But I was particularly pleased that Tsachor includes the urgently expressive No. 2 of her Trois Romances, Op. 11 (ambiguously labelled here, amidst other booklet shortcomings, as an unidentified “Andante”), which she wrote in Paris in aching longing for her distant beloved the year before their hard-won marriage. Recognizing the similarity of one of its motifs with one in his own recent Humoreske, as yet unknown to her, even Schumann himself wrote “I have heard anew that we must become man and wife”.
Needless to say, Schumann’s own influence on all her thoughts is even more apparent than that of her admired Mendelssohn and Chopin. So it is to Tsachor’s great credit that Clara still somehow speaks with a voice and temperament so very much her own throughout the entire recital. His characterization is arrestingly vivid, with contrasts emphasized in bold primary colours rather than the pastel shades often thought more apt for a lady of those times. If this release were at top price, I might well have complained about a touch of metal in the recorded sound (dating from 1984). Yet in the long run I found its clarity easier to accept than the mellower pedal-haze sometimes blurring outlines and slightly blunting point-making in Josef De Beenhouwer’s otherwise sympathetic three-disc assemblage of Clara’s complete piano music (Partridge, 1/93 – nla). In sum, a most welcome super-bargain-price appetizer.'