The Limelight Recording of the Month for May is a treasure-trove of riches from two fin-de-siècle Viennese composers: the chameleon-like Wilhelm Grosz, whose serious songs are less well known than popular hits like Red Sails in the Sunset, and the criminally obscure Robert Gund, friend to Brahms and Mahler, but barely represented, even on disc. It’s the brainchild of Christian Immler and his pianistic partner, in-demand accompanist Helmut Deutsch.

Clive Paget caught up with the German-born, Swiss-domiciled bass-baritone to learn more about these forgotten masters of the Lied.

How did you come across the songs of Robert Gund?

By coincidence, and it was Helmut’s doing; he stumbled across a book – I have it here actually – which is exclusively about Gund and especially about his songs. In the appendix is a detachable small book of music containing 24 songs by Gund. Some are reprinted and others are in handwriting. This is when you still had to pay in Deutsche Mark, so quite a long time ago. He’s a phenomenal sight reader and I’m pretty good as well, so we’ve had fun reading through tons of stuff, and we thought, “this is unusually good”. I then furthered my research in...