Among the often spurious partnerships beloved by musical history — Bach and Handel, Bruckner and Mahler, Britten and Tippett — that of Schumann and Brahms at least has the merit that the composers were not actually antithetical in style and manner. They were, if not a conscious partnership, a powerful joint force for the perpetuation of classical values in the 19th century, the elder — Schumann — the sponsor and active publicist of the other. Brahms was “discovered”, encouraged, sustained and venerated by Schumann. He, in turn, devoted his whole bachelor life to the succour of the Schumann family, giving rock-like support to Clara Schumann as her husband’s syphilitic madness took him over, and seeking to preserve Schumann’s oeuvre at its most illustrious and least clouded-over, withholding publication of some later works.

Clara, too, was a composer as well as a celebrated pianist, and the nice thing about the Royal Northern College of Music’s Schumann and Brahms Fest — the latest in its series of January long weekends (directed by Christoper Rowland) devoted to complete bodies of chamber music — was that it included her as well, and in the most vivid way. The highlight of the weekend, from a historic point of view, was a recital given by the soprano Amanda Pitt and the pianist David Owen Norris, which featured the actual instrument owned by Clara from about 1840 to the mid-1860s. This medium-sized, brown and beautifully ornate grand, marked “W Wieck Dresden”, was made specially for her by the firm of her father and uncle. As Norris pointed out, it has no serial number. It was a true one-off, on which there is little doubt that all these composers must have played.

It was sold, Norris said, perhaps because Clara needed money after Schumann’s death, or merely because it was by then an old-fashioned instrument for a virtuoso such as herself, and went to a buyer in Ireland, in whose family it has remained, and in mint condition. Only occasionally is performance permitted on it. It was shipped to Manchester just in advance of gales that would have kept it from an audience that could not have been more appreciative or attentive. (These fests have a following that does not hesitate to turn out at 9.15 on a Sunday morning or sit through 28 consecutive concerts, not to mention lectures, masterclasses and “blind tastings” of newly made string instruments.) Norris played some florid and felicitous solos by Clara herself — her Three Romances — and the selection of lieder comprised four of her own, four by Brahms and, suitably enough, Schumann’s rapturous portrait of a woman’s marriage, the cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. Pitt put this across with simplicity and conviction, her husky vibrato a natural throb of passion. In the ruminative piano solos characteristic of Schumann’s song setting, Norris was able to demonstrate the instrument’s marvellous woody and individuated sound, each note a separate personality, the treble register suggesting the mellow, effortful lyricism of viola tone. One felt that nothing stood between the composer’s urge to expression and the expression itself. It was daunting to think that Clara’s songs would have been composed on this very keyboard, and possibly Robert’s. The circle of domestic intensity was closed by the final item, Brahms’s song Meine Liebe ist grün, to words by Clara and Robert’s son Felix, named, no doubt, after their friend Mendelssohn, himself the subject of a memorable RNCM chamber fest.

If the weekend’s highlight, from a purely musical point of view (not that I attended everything), was inevitably the closing concert by the Endellion String Quartet, there were plenty of stirring performances along the way. The Johnston String Quartet, formed in 1998 by RNCM undergraduates and possessed of a charismatic cellist in Marie Bitlloch, gave an impassioned yet serenely assured account of the third of Schumann’s three string quartets (a single opus, all written in five weeks in the year after his marriage) and, with Andrew Marriner, a profound one of Brahms’s late, lyrically fused yet mysteriously big-boned Clarinet Quintet. The Gould Piano Trio revealed the beauty and orthodox mastery of Clara’s Piano Trio in G minor, after which Robert’s Fantasiestücke, Op 88, sounded all the more eccentric, rhythmically obsessive, fascinating, moving. Brahms’s early piano trio in B came over as the mighty utterance of a young composer whom both Schumanns regarded as a fully formed, indeed god-like, genius.

Players from Pro Corda, the National School for Young Chamber Music Players, were splendid in Brahms’s G minor piano quartet, a work that, according to the programme book’s string of quotations (perhaps programme notes would be useful too!), Clara thought hadn’t enough G minor in it, and too much D major. They shared a platform, surprisingly but refreshingly, with the Hallé Youth Choir in Brahms and Schumann songs with piano or piano duo, directed by James Burton. At the fest’s other sonic extreme, the Endellions were joined by the violist Predrag Katanic and the cellist Richard Harwood in a magnificent realisation of the sublimely elaborate textures of Brahms’s B flat sextet. Brahms’s grandeur of sonority and conception was what kept striking me as I listened to these allied composers side by side. He never gives less than everything, and often a little bit more.

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