Christian Immler has long championed the songs of so-called entartete (‘degenerate’) composers forced into exile by the Nazis. He and Helmut Deutsch have here fashioned an enterprisingly eclectic programme ranging in idiom from the (very) late Romanticism of Hans Gál – whose atmospheric Lieder tend to suggest a slimmed-down Richard Strauss – to the cabaret songs of Wilhelm Grosz, with their half-echoes of Kurt Weill and New Orleans jazz. En route we get Korngold’s melodically attractive settings from Twelfth Night (‘Come away, Death’, with its Schubertian-Mahlerian equivocations between minor and major, is especially memorable), a clutch of late songs by Zemlinsky that hover on the edge of atonality, and Hanns Eisler in both lyrical and acerbically satirical mode. His ‘Ballade von der Krüppelgarde’ (‘Ballad of the crippled guard’) vies with Mahler’s ‘Revelge’ as the most vicious of anti-war songs – though Franz Schreker’s demonic-grotesque ‘Das feurige Männlein’ runs them close.

With his personable high baritone – mellow yet capable of an incisive edge – and keen intelligence, Immler convinces equally in the mystery and inwardness of the Zemlinsky songs (sung in flawless English), the luminous Gál nocturne ‘Abend auf dem Fluss’ and the mordant ballads of Eisler and Grosz. In the latter he characterises with a sly, acidic wit (I loved his Louis Armstrong moment in Grosz’s ‘Ballade vom Seemann Kuttel Daddeldu’), without becoming over-knowing. Deutsch, always rhythmically acute, proves an ideal collaborator. Sad, then, to end with a serious gripe: with such rare repertoire, translations are indispensable for non-German speakers. CAvi-Music criminally provides translations neither in the booklet (Erik Levi’s excellent note is only partial compensation)
nor on their website.