Johannes Grotzky

The composer Friedrich Gernsheim, who was highly respected during his lifetime, is largely unknown today. Yet, especially in his choral compositions, he broke away from traditional ideas of form at an early stage and was thus ahead of many of his contemporaries. With this recording, Tristan Meister and Vox Quadrata have set themselves the goal of bringing the forgotten choral works of the Jewish composer back into the public consciousness.

France's contribution to the genre of the Baroque solo concerto seems late and tentative, but it is fascinating to see how French composers celebrated the arrival of the violin and combined Italian robustness and French elegance in their works. Johannes Pramsohler and Ensemble Diderot take a journey to the origins of this hybrid form, presenting here the very first violin concertos by French composers, with two world-premiere recordings of concertos by Jean-Marie Leclair and Andre-Joseph Exaudet at the heart of this virtuosic and exciting programme.

This album marks the solo debut of Ensemble Diderot cellist Gulrim Choi and contains several World Premiere Recordings. Faithful to the values of the ensemble, she looks at a facet of a repertoire that has been neglected over time.

The old model for creating a hit classical recording – big-name soloist plus big-name conductor in major repertory work – is not so common anymore, but this live Brahms recording from the Staatskapelle Berlin under Venezuela's Gustavo Dudamel, with Argentine-Israeli-Palestinian-Spanish pianist Daniel Barenboim as soloist, shows that there's life in the concept yet. One could point to the virtues of pianist and conductor separately: it's a rare septuagenarian who can combine power and clear articulation of detail the way Barenboim does, and Dudamel builds a vast sweep in, especially, the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15. But it's the way that the two work together that really makes news. Chalk it up to shared South American heritage or to whatever the listener wants, but the way the orchestra and piano define separate spheres and work them together is extraordinary. Again, it is in the Piano Concerto No. 1 and its Beethovenian drama that their mutual understanding is most evident, but there is a sense of great variety powerfully unified throughout.

It's the late Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, that get the big print on the cover of this release by the awe-inspiring baritone Matthias Goerne, but actually the music on the album falls into a neat early-middle-late classification scheme. The group of middle-period settings of poetry by Heinrich Heine doesn't even get graphics on the cover, but these are fascinating. Brahms wrote a lot of songs, but you couldn't do better than the selection and performances here for a cornerstone collection item. Beyond the sheer beauty of Goerne's voice is an ability to shift gears to match how Brahms' style evolved. If you want to hear his real slashing, operatic high notes, check out the Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 32, settings of poems by the minor poets Georg Friedrich Daumer and Karl August Graf von Platen. These rather overwrought texts add up to a kind of slimmed-down Winterreise, and they catch the spirit of the still-young Brahms with his strong passions, elegantly controlled. The Heine settings, which come from several different sets of lieder, are not that often heard and are in some ways the most compelling of the group here.