Friedrich Gernsheim (1839-1916) clings to the footnotes of musical history. A child prodigy (at his Frankfurt debut he was the soloist in Hummel’s A minor Concerto, played a set of variations on the violin and heard the orchestra play his new overture, all at the age of 11), he prospered as a composer and conductor, becoming known as ‘the Dutch Brahms’ – optimistically, but you can see why. His First Violin Concerto, in the same key as the older composer’s, boasts a last-movement subject that is too close for comfort to the finale of Brahms’s, as close as the ‘Ode to Joy’ is to the fourth movement of Brahms’s First Symphony.

Listening blind to the first movement of Gernsheim’s Op 42 (composed in 1880), your reaction might well be the same as mine – how pleasant, how very like Mendelssohn at times and Bruch at others, and what a shame it does not quite have their melodic genius. It’s a delightful work; but when faced with the competition of Goldmark, for instance, Moszkowski or Vieuxtemps, let alone Mendelssohn, Bruch and Tchaikovsky, you can see why it fell by the wayside.

Let me emphasise: it is well worth hearing, as is the earlier Fantasiestück, Op 33 (1876). As the informative booklet observes, ‘a genuinely great qualitative gap between [it] and, say, Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy is not really in evidence’. Linus Roth makes the most of its soaring flights of fancy. Gernsheim’s Violin Concerto No 2 might have been composed more than three decades after No 1 but inhabits the same world, though it is more concentrated in its musical arguments and with more individual touches. At one time it looked as though it might take off when it was championed by Georg Kulenkampff. Here it is given a well-merited second chance in an excellent, focused recording.