If you were seeking to dispel the image of Gernsheim as an epigone of Brahms and a lesser-known contemporary of Bruch, you would not start here. With his Fifth Quartet, published in 1911, Gernsheim plants us deep in familiar territory. The signposts are clearly marked: a hemiola-rich opening, a faery pizzicato Scherzo and a slow movement of halting, suppressed passion, cast in a fragile F major but closely related in expression to the example of Mendelssohn’s ‘Requiem for Fanny’ in Op 80.

The String Quintet was first performed just months before Gernsheim’s death in 1916, and there are certain traces of ‘lateness’ beyond the mastery of craft which gives the impression of ceaseless fertility in a self-renewing idiom of late Romanticism. The melodic profile of the opening movement is stronger and sharper than in the Fifth Quartet; no wonder that Christian Starke cites it as the high point of the composer’s chamber music in his excellent booklet essay. Gernsheim’s practised Brahmsian technique spins a restless Scherzo out of a familiar cadence from Beethoven’s Op 132. The presence of Beethoven continues to haunt an Adagio apparently written by Gernsheim in the midst of grief at his daughter’s death in a road accident.

The performances have everything to recommend them: rhythmically vital, carefully prepared and engineered, continually leaning into climaxes and then sympathetically drawing breath without unduly arch or overwrought expression. So if the figure of Gernsheim sparks your interest for his own sake, by all means start here.