Here are 54 minutes of unassuming ‘domestic’ music, played carefully without special pleading or concert-hall-type projection of any kind, and reproduced as truthfully as if the three artists were at your side in your own room. Schumann’s Marchenerzahlungen came last in his endearing autumnal series of miniatures for various instruments and piano, emerging only four months before his breakdown, during happy days of music-making at home in Dusseldorf with the newly-discovered youthful Brahms. In this performance, a little more vitality, imaginative as well as rhythmic, would not have come amiss to help disguise the work’s unmistakable traces of four-square thinking and repetitive patterning. Bruch’s Acht Stucke, inspired by his clarinettist son, bring all three players out of their shells rather more – both in plangent song and the welcome contrasting elan of Nos. 4 and 7.
In conclusion it is only fair to remind prospective purchasers that this full-price disc brings us only Schumann and Bruch whereas its two highly acclaimed most recent predecessors (Hilton, Imai, Vignoles for Chandos, 4/91, and de Graaf, Shimon and Wayenberg for Channel Classics Canal Grande, 4/93) also include Mozart’s masterly Kegelstatt Trio for the same unusual instrumental combination. Moreover, the latter version is at mid price.'