Period-instrument recordings of Schumann’s chamber masterpiece didn’t much impress me when I surveyed them for a Gramophone Collection (12/07). This one, however – although it’s unlikely to be anybody’s reference version – has a particular claim to that elusive concept of ‘authenticity’, inasmuch as it was recorded at the Robert-Schumann-Haus, the composer’s birthplace museum in Zwickau, using an 1860s piano from the workshop of Clara’s cousin Wilhelm Wieck.

It’s a fine-sounding instrument, with plenty of round-toned voice remaining after a century and a half. The Schumann House’s concert hall seats 140 and looks most inviting, although it’s not quite big enough for the exercise of recording a symphonic chamber work such as this; lines become entangled and can’t readily be discerned by the ear. Andreas Gerhardus’s viola doesn’t quite cut through in the Funeral March as it should, for example, and the most successful moments are the quiet ones, such as the Scherzo’s first episode. Nevertheless, this is a decent performance, fleeter than some in the Funeral March and brisk in the finale, with a fine sense of homecoming as Schumann ties up all the loose contrapuntal threads in the work’s magnificent denouement.

Ferdinand Hiller’s Quintet escaped my notice when I rounded up 10 such works for a Specialist’s Guide (2/14). Nevertheless, I noted then that the quintet medium often brings out the best in composers, and this G major work of 1873 is no exception, taking its most audible lead from Schumann’s towering example (listen from around 6'20" in the opening Allegro con anima and elsewhere for near-cribs). Some moments of ripe intonation suggest that it’s not quite so securely under the fingers as the Schumann but it presents a good case for Hiller, who is one of those men – like Frank Bridge – unfairly relegated to being best known for a work by another composer.