The selection here represents a little under half of Gál’s lieder output, nearly all of it unpublished to this day. As a fine scholar of Schubert as well as a fastidiously self-critical composer he knew his limitations, and he ceased writing songs for solo voice altogether after 1921, some time later selecting just five of them to be published as his Op 33. His observation that ‘Vocal expression was, as it were, Schubert’s mother tongue’ could not be applied to him. All the same, listeners who do not arrive anticipating a successor to Wolf or a sequel to Mahler’s Rückert Lieder will not be disappointed.

Gál chose his texts carefully, avoiding overlap or unfavourable comparison with established masterpieces. I sense not only the shadow of the Erl-King falling over Gál’s Hesse setting ‘Der böse Tag’ but also the imperative to resist cheap imitation. The piano-writing here and elsewhere feels more idiomatic than the vocal line, and in evocative scene-settings such as the ‘Abendlied’ the instrumental part would serve as an evocative tone poem in its own right, to which the sometimes awkward, expressionist angles of the song add relatively little meaning or atmosphere.

As a melodist Gál wrote over or against the bar line more naturally than within it – closer to Haydn than Mozart in spirit – which may also explain why ardent or contented voices are outnumbered by and ill at ease in the company of characters bruised by life and, in the words of Heine, ‘Liebesmüde’ (‘Tired of love’). In this regard, his time is now; late in 2020, Christian Morgenstern’s ‘November Day’ strikes an unwonted chord: ‘No one goes out without cause; everyone falls to meditation.’

Immler and Deutsch included Gál’s Op 33 on a 2011 AVI ‘Modern Times’ recital of Schreker, Goldschmidt, Zemlinsky et al (4/12), and their equably balanced partnership offers us the full measure of these lieder, their disquiet and lopsided poetry. Immler’s baritone sounds more parched than his Christus for Masaaki Suzuki’s Gramophone Award-winning St Matthew Passion (4/20), showing signs of strain at the top, but moulding Gál at his most Brahmsian – such as the rueful retrospective of the album’s closing ‘Abend auf dem Fluss’, setting one of Bethge’s Chinese Flute lyrics – with warmth and intense sympathy.