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A native of St Petersburg, Ingeborg von Bronsart studied with Liszt in Weimar, her striking appearance earning her the nickname ‘Ingeborg die Schöne’. Goethe’s libretto for Jery und Bätely is a charming and bucolic tale of unrequited romance between a pretty Swiss milkmaid and an eligible bachelor who are ultimately brought together by some farcical matchmaking. Bronsart brings life to this story with exquisite music, from an exciting overture through an uninterrupted evolution in melody and harmony to a spine-tingling finale, delivering a Singspiel that helped establish her reputation as a successful composer for the stage.

The three Italian choral works on this album cast new light on pre-existing musical material. Corrado Margutti’s Missa Lorca fuses the words of Federico Garcia Lorca with an evocation of Monteverdi’s polyphonic textures to create fascinating sounds, as the two movements from the Mass reveal. Pizzetti’s Messa di Requiem, the first of his great choral compositions, offers a wealth of expressive detail notably the use of Gregorian chant in music of huge range and richness. Lorenzo Donati’s Sicut Cervus fittingly concludes this selection as it threads music from Palestrina into his piece illuminating the past with vivid new colours.