By coincidence, on the day this CPO disc arrived for review I was engaged in researching the booklet for a future issue of this same previously unrecorded concerto. So let me be the first to tell you that Anton Urspruch was born and died in Frankfurt (1850-1907), was a pupil of Raff and Liszt among others, and made his career as a teacher and composer. He also wrote an influential book on Gregorian Chant (published 1901) and married the daughter of the music publisher August Cranz.

Unsurprisingly, his E flat Concerto, Op 9, was published by that house. It is a fine work, though with an overlong (22'09") first movement, a pastoral idyll with an attractive lilt and pretty themes in which the piano remains almost wholly subdued. The second movement finds it principally in accompanying mode, woodwind ensemble and solos dominating, while the finale finally offers the soloist the chance to let loose with several different lively treatments of its earworm principal subject that threatens to become ‘My heart ever faithful’ from Bach’s Cantata No 68. It is tremendously well played by Oliver Triendl, who has made a career of digging up such rarely performed works as this. The piece would sit very well in the Hyperion Romantic Piano Concerto series – as indeed it will at a future date, coupled with one of the really great examples of the genre, the F sharp minor Concerto of Hans von Bronsart.

CPO, on the other hand, has decided to leave Triendl’s splendid performance on its own short-time disc (41'39") and accompany it on a second CD with more Urspruch in E flat major: his Symphony, Op 14. It is a long work (four movements lasting a little over 50 minutes in this performance) which, on my first and subsequent hearings, failed to hold my attention. The CD booklet (as discursive in its quaint English translation as the music it discusses) reveals that a critic in 1881, following the symphony’s premiere in Wiesbaden, opined that ‘Brahms is the only other composer who could have written it!’ One sees what the critic means so far as orchestration, texture and craftsmanship are concerned; but whereas Brahms gives you a clear route map and sends you down the street singing, Urspruch meanders and, to be frank, stops well short of genius. The Scherzo is the best movement, while the vigorous finale, with its nods to Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann, is the most arresting. The symphony was performed regularly until about 1900. Whether it has sufficient appeal today to make a return to the repertoire I very much doubt.