Patrick Rucker thought very highly of Nino Gvetadze’s Schumann recording on this label (12/20), so I was intrigued to hear her tackle Brahms. Her programme brings together two important women in Brahms’s life, Clara Schumann and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, dedicatees of the Handel Variations and Two Rhapsodies, respectively. (The ‘sorrows’ linked with Op 117 appear to have included von Herzogenberg’s death in 1892.)

The artistry and technique evinced in her Schumann are equally evident here: I particularly enjoyed her Handel Variations, whose narrative arc comes across very strongly, with an emphasis on subtlety rather than power or monumentality, and on the set’s origins in the Baroque: there’s lovely psychological ambiguity in the two-part canon of Var 6, and the following con vivacità has real urgency by way of contrast. In the fugal finale, monumentality is hard to avoid; here I felt more contrast between the episodes would have been possible, and perhaps less pedal at the dominant pedal point just before the end, so that the strands woven above it are clearer still. But it’s a convincing rendition, all in all.

The Rhapsodies are less satisfying to my taste, because I prefer a steelier approach to the underlying pulse where Gvetadze lingers on details and pauses in unexpected places (my reference recording in these middle and late pieces being Mikhail Rudy). There’s plenty of lingering in the Intermezzos, too, but then there’s more space in which to linger: in the last of the set, especially, still more space is opened up, to great poetic effect, and she renders the ambiguity of Brahms’s transitions between sections very effectively. The Intermezzos are the most consistently convincing part of the recital; I’d gladly hear Gvetadze’s take on the other late cycles (or the Op 76 set, for that matter).

By way of conclusion, one of the Muses of the recital’s title speaks in her own voice: Clara Schumann’s A minor Romanze made me wish that the other two of the set had been included as well.