Hansjörg Albrecht’s survey of Braunfels’s orchestral Lieder gets off to a strange start, since just over half of its first instalment is taken up by the purely orchestral Don Juan of 1924, making its second appearance on disc this year. The rest consists of works for voice and orchestra written between 1913 and 1916, though ‘Vorspiel und Prolog der Nachtigall’ and ‘Abschied vom Walde’, for soprano and tenor respectively, are effectively concert fragments from the opera Die Vögel, composed before the rest of the score and eventually forming its opening and closing scenes.

The primary focus consequently falls on the big Hesse setting Auf ein Soldatengrab and the Hölderlin Songs, two wartime works for bass-baritone, premiered together in 1918 but written in 1915-16, after Braunfels’s conscription into the German army but before he had seen the horrors of active service. Though ambivalent, they are not pacifist. ‘Oh take me, take me into your ranks that I might not die an ordinary death’, Hölderlin writes. And a stoically lyrical nobility, suggestive of patriotic self-sacrifice, alternates with ostinato-driven fear and unnerving apprehensions of carnage, the melodic contours and dense orchestration revealing a close familiarity with parts 2 and 3 of Gurrelieder. Michael Volle sings them with such raw intensity that his occasional moments of unsteadiness don’t matter that much.

Albrecht’s conducting is fierce and passionate here, though elsewhere he seemingly favours lucidity over drive. The Vögel extracts sound exquisite as played by the Weimar Staatskapelle: Valentina Farcas negotiates the Nightingale’s Zerbinetta ish coloratura with ravishing tone and delightful ease; Klaus Florian Vogt is clean and clear but characterless in ‘Abschied vom Walde’. Don Juan, which despite its Straussian title is actually a set of variations on themes from Don Giovanni, is super-cool and refined: its predecessor, from Markus L Frank and the Altenburg-Gera Philharmonic (Capriccio, 2/16) has some rough-edged playing but gives an altogether stronger impression of its emotional and dramatic range.