The second instalment of Hansjörg Albrecht’s Braunfels survey improves markedly on its predecessor (8/16). First, it consists entirely of original works for voice and orchestra, without the operatic offcuts or purely orchestral music that padded Volume 1. Second, it has marginally the better orchestra: this is not to dismiss the Weimar Staatskapelle’s fine contribution to the first disc, but given Albrecht’s sensuous way with Braunfels’s textures, the slightly sharper focus of the Berlin Konzerthausorchester’s playing is a distinct bonus.

We get a stronger impression of Braunfels as a song composer, too, and in particular a powerful sense of his use of the orchestral song as a personal response to political crisis. With the exception of the Drei chinesische Gesänge of 1914, their eroticism soured by uneasy prophecies of impending conflict, all the works recorded here were written or completed during the Third Reich, when proscriptions against his music meant no guarantee of public performance. Die Gott minnende Seele, from 1935, is a harmonically complex affirmation of the Catholicism to which Braunfels converted in 1918. Begun during the First World War, Romantische Gesänge was only completed during the Second. The dark, uncompromising Vier japanische Gesänge of 1945 were a response to the death of Braunfels’s younger son on the Eastern front. Even the cantata Der Tod der Kleopatra (1944), which inevitably invites comparison with Berlioz, is a war work with its depiction of suicide in the aftermath of defeat.

The material is shared between three very different sopranos. Ricarda Merbeth is more at home with the declamation of the Japanische Gesänge than as Cleopatra, whose high-lying phrases expose pressure in her upper registers. Genia Kühmeier sounds very assured, though, in Die Gott minnende Seele, where the intervals are tricky and the vocal line disquietingly exposed. Best of all, however, is Camilla Nylund, sumptuous yet keenly responsive to the texts throughout, and displaying superb dynamic control in the Chinesische Gesänge. The latter, placed first on a disc that runs chronologically, is a deeply haunting work that should, by rights, be heard with greater frequency.