‘Just let me jump in the saddle!’ A march rhythm, a jaunty swagger from the orchestra and – swirling that fresh, handsome baritone above his head – Benjamin Appl launches enthusiastically into ‘Freisinn’, the first of 22 orchestral songs by Hans Sommer. No, me neither: turns out Sommer was born in Braunschweig in 1837 and went into the family camera-manufacturing business before emerging, first as a very capable amateur composer and later a thoroughly accomplished pro. All but one of the songs on this disc are premiere recordings.

This is enormously beguiling music, firmly in the German Romantic tradition – setting poems (mostly by Goethe) filled with the usual lovers, forests and Loreleis (in fact, Sommer’s 1889 opera Lorelei – from which five stand-alone songs appear here – was much admired by the young Richard Strauss). Sommer was a Wagnerite but not a Wagnerian; the musical language is closer to Schumann (or perhaps Wunderhorn-era Mahler without the irony), and none the worse for it. There isn’t a song here that doesn’t have its share of magic, and a few – ‘Beherzigung I’, the two-part ‘Sir Aethelbert’ and the (on this one occasion) positively Wagner‑ish ‘Im Sturme’ – feel almost like pocket operas.

Calvo conducts his Berlin orchestra with a smile. The Pentatone engineers have found a lively (but never overbearing) balance between orchestra and four notably youthful-sounding singers, all of whom acquit themselves with warmth and style, and who come together in a delightful final drinking song, ‘Istud vinum’ – which, if there’s any justice, will become a popular encore (along with the delicious ‘Lockung’ from the same Op 4 cycle). By this point you’re smiling along with them: a lovely introduction to a thoroughly likeable composer.