Max Bruch’s music has been popular with string players for the past century and a half but his is not a name that immediately comes to mind when thinking of late 19th-century piano composers. Bruch’s attitude towards the instrument he called a ‘barren rattletrap’ was ambivalent at best. But when he did turn his attention to the piano, the results were often idiomatic and never less than attractive. Christoph Keymer’s album offers a sympathetic and representative sampling of Bruch’s original works and arrangements.

The Six Piano Pieces, Op 12, dating from 1861, are essentially character miniatures, the longest lasting around two and a half minutes. Atmospheric, varied and melodically and harmonically fresh, they exude a beguiling intimacy. The two more extended pieces of Op 14 are finely wrought, abundantly lyrical and quite original. The first is a pleasantly sentimental Romance, while the technical resources required for the quick and impassioned second remind us that Bruch was a pupil of Reinecke. A selection of these pieces would be a welcome change of pace in any piano recital today.

The runaway commercial success of the Hungarian Dances of Brahms, with whom Bruch shared a publisher, may have been an impetus for the latter’s 1892 Swedish Dances. While not on a par with the best of Grieg’s folk-inspired piano music, these dances are an evocative testament to Bruch’s lifelong adoration of folk music.

Of the arrangements of works for other media, the scenes from Achilleus are perhaps most appealing. They provide a glimpse into Bruch’s many oratorios, considered by his contemporaries to be among the composer’s greatest achievements.

Christof Keymer is clearly a musician who relishes ferreting out the unfamiliar yet worthwhile. His previous recordings have surveyed transcriptions of Moszkowski and the music of Hermann Goetz. With Bruch, his sensitive and imaginative piano-playing adds understated charm to the pleasures of discovering this unfamiliar repertory.