This is the fourth, and presumably final, instalment of Alexander Shelley’s series of double albums themed around the musical inter-relationships between Clara and Robert Schumann and Brahms. Each instalment (see 10/20 and 3/22 for earlier volumes) has paired the same-numbered symphonies by Brahms and Robert, played with élan by Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, based in Ottawa (like Andrew Farach-Colton before me, I am a fan). It may be that both composers shared ‘a fundamental conservatism in their musical ideals’, as annotator Jan Swafford suggests, but as far as their final symphonies are concerned, they could scarcely be more different.

Shelley shapes Schumann’s Fourth very crisply, with playing of rhythmic clarity (something not always evident in some earlier volumes). There is real zing in the fleeter movements, and if not quite matching Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra (Arte Nova – nla) or Kenneth Woods’s splendid recording with the Orchestra of the Swan (Avie, 8/13), one would not feel short-changed hearing this in any concert hall. So, too, with the Brahms, ‘the composer’s single most perfect yet perplexing piece of musical architecture’, as Andrew Mellor memorably described it (9/21). It is a work inhabiting darkness, ending in a passacaglia as expansive as it is severe. Shelley and the NAC’s interpretation is a solid account rather than exceptionally insightful; in the context of the series, however, it fits in neatly.

The main musical focus of the set and the series as a whole – rightly – is Clara, whether her Piano Concerto (Vol 1), songs (Vol 2) or chamber music (Vol 3). In this fourth instalment, it is her solo piano music, mostly, that takes centre stage, with a sequence of Romances on the first disc, and preludes and fugues (giving context to Brahms’s classicism) on the second. The Three Romances, Op 11, are among Clara’s best-known and most-recorded pieces and Stewart Goodyear, who has gradually replaced Gabriela Montero as the series has progressed, plays them with assurance. If not giving an account to displace Isata Kanneh-Mason’s more publicised recording (Decca, 8/19), Goodyear has a real feeling for Clara’s music, as his reading of the late Romance in B minor, written just after Robert’s death in 1856, affirms. Yosuke Kawasaki and Angela Hewitt are on point in the Romances, Op 22, but it is the succession of fugues and preludes and fugues that offer another view of Clara’s musicality: she was an early advocate of Bach’s keyboard music, and it shows here. The encore, Goodyear’s enjoyable Improvisations on Themes of Clara Schumann, is touching, one composer-pianist’s tribute across the centuries to another. A fine conclusion (presumably) to the series.