Though in later life much preoccupied with larger orchestral, choral and operatic projects as well as public platform duties as Dusseldorf's music director, Schumann never lost his love of music-making at home—as the five little suites of miniatures on this disc immediately reveal. Neither players nor listeners are in any way overtaxed; it is essentially music for domestic delight. I'm only sorry that space couldn't be found to complete the picture with the 1849 Adagio and Allegro for horn and piano (even if played by the alternative violin or cello sanctioned by the composer).
Readers may remember how much I enjoyed the sensitivity and finesse of Portal, Rudy and Pergamenschikov in Brahms's clarinet sonatas and Trio last May. Here they are joined by the equally fine-grained Gerard Causse when a viola is required, as in the 1851 Marchenbilder (with its very lovely concluding lullaby) and again in the potently contrasted Marchenerzahlungen for piano, clarinet and viola, completed only four months before Schumann's mental collapse. The capriciously fanciful No. 1 and tenderly sung No. 3 are surely the gems here.
The much more frequently recorded earlier suites for clarinet, cello and oboe, each alone with piano, all grew from the politically disturbed year of 1849 when Schumann found his most fruitful solace in the sphere of the instrumentally-inspired miniature. In these I enjoyed Pergamenschikov's vivid, spontaneous-sounding characterization and tonal beauty throughout the genial Funf Stucke im Volkston as much as I did Portal's liquidity and intimately personal inflexions of phrasing in the three nostalgically tinged Fantasiestucke for clarinet and piano, Op. 73. Portal's phrasing is no less persuasive in the Drei Romanzen, Op. 94, not least in the fairy-tale wonderment of the last. But some of the higher flights of the first do seem to cry out for the oboe for which these three pieces were originally intended. Rudy is an unfailing source of strength throughout. In robuster 'Florestan' contexts I did sometimes wonder if he realized just how strong he was. Perhaps his engineers didn't either in an otherwise splendidly clear and vibrant recording.'