The warm period sonorities of the Kölner Akademie – pure-toned strings and downy flutes – help to place Emilie Mayer as a strongly independent contemporary of Mendelssohn and Schumann in this collection of four overtures. No less revealingly, they give away the comparatively anachronistic, Classical-era nature of her writing in the Piano Concerto.

Tobias Koch plays a Blüthner from 1859; very much the kind of piano used by András Schiff on his enlightening OAE-accompanied set of the Brahms concertos (ECM, 7/21). You would be hard-pressed to guess the match, however, given the undemanding pleasantries of Mayer’s B flat Concerto, which (from 1857) predates the completion of Brahms’s D minor by a single unlikely year in chronological terms, and about six decades stylistically.

Koch and Willens do more for the piece – more keenly shaped phrasing, a stronger feeling for its fleeting moments of drama as well as winsome poetry – than a rival, modern-orchestra account on Capriccio. Nevertheless, the overtures will be the draw for any collector of Mayer or chaser after Romantic rarities. CPO’s typically excellent notes (by Bert Hagels) set out a tangled history, complicated by the paradoxically abstract identity of what should be (and might well be) directly illustrative music, as well as the sad loss of many scores by Mayer in the interim.

Mayer wrote as many as 12 overtures, all of them concert works in the mould of Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides (1830‑32) or for that matter Wagner’s Faust Overture (1839‑40). This surviving quartet demands no great effort of the imagination to associate themes and episodes with potential subjects and settings in the manner of Liszt’s tone poems: a heroic struggle outlined in the slow introduction to No 3, for example, followed by a Fidelio-like bid for freedom in the main Allegro. Willens directs with a sure hand and the Kölner Akademie’s playing is better drilled and more attractive than a rival set on MDG.