There are many reasons to applaud this release. First of all, there’s Voilà Records, a new French label dedicated to the rediscovery of neglected voices from the past. Secondly, the performances by a group of rising stars are all of them first rate. Chiefly, however, it’s hats off to the composer, a lost soul resurrected from out of the murky netherworld of fin de siècle Vienna. Despite being close to Mahler and Schoenberg, Oskar Posa is today a complete unknown with not one note of recorded music in the current catalogue. But what music!

First of all, some background. Oskar Posamentir (the ‘mentir’ was ditched, perhaps to conceal his origins) was born in Leopoldstadt, the Jewish quarter of Vienna, in 1873, two years after Zemlinsky and one year before Schoenberg. Trained as a lawyer, he took private lessons in composition and converted to Catholicism aged 24. By the turn of the century his early Lieder were being enthusiastically received across Europe. He was even taken up by Brahms’ publisher Simrock. The Viennese press, however, did him down, panning his Violin Sonata much as they did Mahler’s symphonies or...