Born in Germany in 1837, dying in 1922, Hans Sommer saw music evolve from Schumann to Schoenberg, Wagner to Webern. A scientist and mathematician by profession, he had an innate musicality, starting to compose as a child but turning to music full-time only in his late forties. Though encouraged by progressives like Liszt and Strauss, Sommer seems to have preferred an easy-going romanticism to anything more boldly dramatic or expressionistic, and it might be significant that the one song included on this disc that hints at something more monumental is a setting of Goethe’s ‘Symbolum’, a poem hymning the virtues of freemasonry that the leading masters of the Romantic Lied seem to have avoided.

It’s when he tackles such familiar Goethe texts as ‘An den Mond’, ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’ and the Harper and Mignon songs from Wilhelm Meister that Sommer courts inevitable comparison with the formidable likes of Schubert and Wolf. Sadly, he has little to offer beyond a generalised, relatively bland lyricism, missing both the intensity and sublimity that Schubert and Wolf provide. The accompaniments, though sensitively scored, remain decorously subordinate, with a minimum of initial scene-setting. And even when the comparison is with a lesser figure, as with ‘Der Türmer singt auf der Schlosswarte’, Karl Loewe’s beautifully serene setting wins the contest by a mile.

Sommer could not have hoped for more eloquent advocacy than the marvellously refined mezzo of Elisabeth Kulman, her verbal clarity and sense of line in both Sapphos Gesänge and the Goethe settings a joy to hear in nicely balanced recordings. Bo Skovhus, assigned the more declamatory Goethe items, can do less to disguise their musical limitations but, like Kulman, he shows a keen appreciation of texts which are archetypally Romantic in their focus on human sorrows and the joys of the natural world.