Robert Fuchs is a largely forgotten name these days but in 19th-century Vienna he was very much an established part of the musical landscape, even if simultaneously a figure content to remain below the wider public radar. Born near Graz in 1847, he moved to Vienna aged 18 to study composition at the Vienna Conservatory with Otto Dessoff and Joseph Hellmesberger. By 1875 he was a professor of composition, teaching harmony and musical theory to Mahler, Sibelius, Wolf, Schmidt, Zemlinksy, Korngold and Schreker, while also composing a substantial body of orchestral and chamber works, the popularity of his six orchestral serenades earning him the nickname ‘Serenaden-Fuchs’ (‘Serenade Fox’). It was around these years that he struck up a friendship with Brahms, who championed Fuchs’s Symphony No 1 to his own publisher Simrock and declared Fuchs to be ‘a splendid musician, everything … so fine and skilful, so charmingly invented, that one is always pleased’. He was also organist at the city’s Hofkapelle from 1894 to 1905. So while the early 20th-century stylistic revolutions wrought by the likes of Mahler and Schoenberg quickly pushed to the side his more old-fashioned brand of melodic Viennese Romanticism – the ghosts of Schubert and Brahms hover strongly over its pure-lined lyricism and lucid textures – it’s easy today to hear in it all the charm that won Brahms’s admiration.

The readings in hand here see Hyejin Chung and Warren Lee complete the sonata cycle for Naxos whose first half was appreciatively reviewed by Richard Wigmore (12/20). I hadn’t read that earlier review before giving these readings their first few spins, so when I did, it was good news to see how substantially his views tallied with my own appreciation of the easy-flowing clean-lined melodicism, purity and lucidity of their final three interpretations. Pleasures include the combination of smoothly flowing momentum, weightlessly floating sweetness and more steely drama Chung brings to the central Andante con espressione of Sonata No 4 in E (1905). Also No 6 in G minor, composed in 1915 and dedicated to the young Adolf Busch (leader of the Busch Quartet and one of Fuchs’s admirers), where they capture well the first movement’s balance of nervous sobriety punctuated with sunnier warmth, with Lee also expertly drawing out its Brahmsian flavour; and similarly, the light and dark of their nimbly energetic finale’s major-minor alternations. All in all, the two discs together make for a consistently high-quality and thoroughly enjoyable set.