This four-CD album redresses a faulty or at least misunderstood balance. Superbly played and recorded, it prompts a sharp and necessary awareness of the full range of Clara Schumann’s gifts. A deeply courageous woman who juggled her roles of wife, mother (to eight children), pianist and composer, she also bore the tragedy of her beloved Robert’s collapse into insanity and the added complication of her relationship with Brahms with rare strength and fortitude. Certainly her Op 1 (composed when she was 11) suggests a startling precocity before her skill deepened over the years into music where outward conventions thinly disguise a highly personal and poetic nature. True, she pays loving tribute to her husband’s work, but the listener should not be misled. Theirs was clearly a symbiotic relationship, and composing side by side during the early days of their legendary romance, Schumann both marvelled at and feared her gifts. Indeed, there is evidence to show that Clara felt over-shadowed (“I compose, too,” she asserted as she pushed her compositions under Robert’s door) while Robert felt threatenend by his wife’s celebrity as a pianist (the Tsar of Russia politely enquired of Clara, “and is your husband also musical?”).

Yet Clara always remained true to her own lights. And even when her veneration for others (to Chopin in the exquisite Nocturne from Op 6), is clear she always maintains her own voice. There are some strange prophecies (Alkan’s En rhythme molassique, for example, in her Le ballet des revenants from Op 5) as well as a capacity to wear her cap and gown with the best of them (the Op 16 Preludes and Fugues) or play her virtuoso trump cards with aplomb (Op 14 and the Agitato from Op 21). But whether you turn to the chirpy Scherzo from her single Piano Sonata or to the scintillating volante close to the Op 8 Variations you will be brilliantly surprised and subtly challenged. This issue is an invaluable addition to the catalogue.