This is the first of a planned series of three records entitled “Brahms and his Times”, intended, says Johannes Moser, “to bridge the period between Johannes Brahms’s move to Vienna and the musical innovations that finally culminated in Arnold Schoenberg”, and 12-note music. It was Schoenberg, famously, who wrote an epoch-making article entitled “Brahms the Progressive”, which Moser avoids mentioning in his insert-note conversation with Richard Eckstein, perhaps because he wishes to suggest a lyrical continuity rather than a move “forward” from Brahms (1833-97). Certainly the lyricism is there in the unjustly neglected works by Fuchs (1847-1927) and Zemlinsky (1871-1927). Fuchs’s opening movement draws on sweeping Brahmsian phrases which echo the manner and indeed the formal matter of Brahms’s F major Cello Sonata; and his beautiful Adagio con sentimento yields nothing to Brahms in its melodic beauty. As Brahms himself said, in another context, “Fuchs is a great musician. So fine and so skilled, so enchantingly inventive.” If the closing Allegro vivace is rather weaker, it is still excellently wrought, and enjoyable. It suits the players’ style, which is warm rather than forceful, and less effective with Brahms’s powerful opening movement than in the others and in Fuchs’s work.

Zemlinsky was a more progressive composer but his idiom is indeed grounded in Brahms, and the Sonata is a strong work, with the same generous lyricism but more chromatic and strenuous, especially in the finale. The players bring it off successfully, and draw welcome attention to a work that disappeared from view for a while and should now interest more cellists.