The music of Walter Braunfels (1882-1954), half-Jewish and ardently Catholic, disappeared from view in the middle of the last century, initially for reasons of ethnic chauvinism, later because his idiom seemed out of kilter with the progressive ethos of the times. Unlike Franz Schreker or Erich Wolfgang Korngold, he has as much in common with Hans Pfitzner, an early mentor, as with the more radical kind of Richard Strauss. And, while more and more of his output is being revived today, nothing seems to have quite the freshness of the opera Die Vögel (‘The Birds’), Braunfels’s greatest hit. That’s where newcomers would be well advised to start. The work is available as an audio download with Lothar Zagrosek conducting, part of the legendary Entartete Musik series (Decca, 4/97), or better still on DVD and Blu ray in a staging by the Los Angeles Opera under James Conlon (ArtHaus).

The present coupling, a typically audacious offering from one of our most adventurous labels, will delight readers attracted by expertly crafted late-Romantic fare, without dispelling the suspicion that Braunfels might have been a more interesting composer had he been prepared to admit a modicum of ‘degeneracy’. There’s more chromaticism in the relatively downbeat Schottische Phantasie of 1932 33 than in the heroic, frequently Brahmsian Piano Concerto of 1910 11. There it’s as if Salome never happened.

Is Braunfels’s thematic invention strong enough to animate his extended structures? Possibly not, yet his music can still be rich and appealing enough for home listening. The composer was an accomplished pianist and his technically demanding Piano Concerto is well served by its Australian soloist. The opening promises much with its cinematic sweep and the slow movement has genuine breadth and nobility; it’s a pity the music runs out of steam in the meandering cyclical finale. A pleasure, however, to re encounter the artistry of Sarah-Jane Bradley even in the less immediately assimilable Schottische Phantasie. Its unlikely wellspring is ‘Ca’ the yowes’ – the folksong famously adapted by Robert Burns. Braunfels turned to Shakespeare for Ariels Gesang (1910), a deliberately elusive, purely orchestral tone-poem placed here between the bigger utterances. Delicate and often rather lovely, it poses fewer problems of balance than its companions, whose orchestral textures boast range and body without the nth degree of clarity. There are full notes by Jürgen Schaarwächter. pan>