Brahms’s hearty Liebeslieder Waltzes offer two distinct experiences: soloists relaxing with charming, intelligent music without great technical demands, and choruses enjoying recreational singing rather than playing to the balcony. Obviously, the 34-voice RIAS Kammerchor falls into the latter category, but despite good intentions exposes the music’s fragility and fails to reveal it in optimum form.

The exterior polish of the performances creates a kind of neutrality that homogenises the music, which already (and purposely) lacks the kind of three-dimensional word-settings heard in Brahms’s lieder, and with harmonic structures that recall the composer’s early masterpieces (the Op 17 songs for female chorus, harp and piano) but without the depth of emotional content. Somewhat distant microphone placement assures that the periodic bursts of choral heat are heard from an aural distance.

In the second set, Neue Liebeslieder, Op 65, individual choir members step forwards from the ranks – though in a manner that’s even more interpretatively reticent than the choral performances that come before. As with the chorus, the sound picture imposes a sameness on the piano duo Angela Gassenhuber and Philip Mayers, who intersperse Hungarian Dances (obviously without voice) and ones with the more conventional rhythms. They’re nice additions but don’t wake up the album in ways that one hopes.

My personal attachment is to the 1952 recording of soloists including Irmgard Seefried and Kathleen Ferrier of Op 52 (Decca, 2/88, 9/92) though, on the choral front, I also enjoy Helmuth Rilling’s complete set of Op 52 and Op 65 with Gächinger Kantorei (Profil): it’s a pleasing middle ground between the two approaches with a forthright chorus that is not afraid to sing out with a soloistic spirit.