Could last year’s centenary commemorations be rekindling interest in Clara as composer? Here, Cristina Ortiz excludes all light-hearted juvenilia. We meet Clara Wieck through her D minor Scherzo (Op. 10) and her three Romances (Op. 11), written while yearning for her “distant beloved” only a year or so before their marriage in 1840. Everything else stems from Clara Schumann, with her 1853 birthday gift to Robert, the Variations on a theme of lifelong significance to them both (eventually published as No. 4 of his retrospective Bunte Blatter in 1851) as the most revealing glimpse of her potential had his breakdown the following year not killed practically all her further creative urge.
Ortiz plays this work with the warm sympathy and sensitivity that characterizes the whole disc, ensuring that the theme itself is never far out of earshot in decorative surroundings. But Jozef de Beenhouwer (in his three-disc recording of Clara’s complete piano works) makes more of the boldness and daring of accompanying figuration, likewise of harmonic surprise, as well as sweeping the Variations into a more continuous and unified whole.
Ortiz finds readier outlet for her own temperament in the two earlier Scherzos, savouring their contrasts of turbulence and repose to the full. And the immediacy of her response to the second of the Op. 11 Romances reaffirms it as the most urgently committed, personal avowal of love and longing ever to come from Clara’s musical pen. The gentle nostalgia of the later Romances is also tellingly conveyed. But in the very last in B minor of 1856 I think Jozef de Beenhouwer’s simpler flow is more closely attuned to the thematic secrets meant only for the ear of its youthful dedicatee, Johannes Brahms.
Though not quite five star, the disc’s sound quality justifies its fair release at medium price.'