The composer’s names are familiar but the titles – and the medium in which they’re written – are mostly unknown. Having defined big-orchestra 19th-century composition, Wagner, Liszt and Strauss are heard here in transcriptions, early works and private pieces that aren’t widely known, many of them originating as songs – and reminding us how often that was at the core of their grandest conceptions. Revelations? I didn’t have any; but the album is pleasant company, thanks partly to the ingratiating playing and acoustically inviting sound of the disc.

The better-known pieces include a transcript of Wagner’s ‘Träume’ from the Wesondonck-Lieder and the Strauss song ‘Cäcilie’. Less known are some songs that Wagner wrote, whether early on or for special occasions, reminding you how inconsequential he could be while writing on demand. Performing songs that began with words but lost them in transciption requires a particular kind of charisma (Fritz Kreisler had it but not Isaac Stern) that I don’t hear here.

Most interesting are the three Liszt pieces, which may not be major but are certainly earnest, with his singular fusion of spirituality and sentimentality, skirting that line from bar to bar amid the Parsifal quotations in Am Grabe Richard Wagners. Strauss’s Violin Sonata, Op 18, written when the composer was 24, should be more evolved than it is; perhaps the composer was making one last pass through the techniques of his elders before breaking forth with a harmonic signature that would serve him for roughly 60 years. Not pieces that need to be heard often – even in performances as winning as these.