A Frankfurt-based copyright lawyer and synagogue cantor, Max Kowalski (1882-1956) was a part-time composer of songs – over 200 in all – some of which were popular in Germany until 1933, when his work was proscribed by the Nazis. Though he considered himself ‘an arch Romantic’, his career intersects with Schoenberg’s. In 1913 Kowalski composed a setting for voice and piano of Giraud’s Pierrot lunaire, usually called the Pierrot Lieder to distinguish it from Schoenberg’s masterpiece, of which Kowalski was unaware. Schoenberg, however, subsequently became one of his legal clients, and the two corresponded after Kowalski was forced into exile following the closure of his law firm, the confiscation of his property and a brief internment in Buchenwald. He never returned to Germany and died in London, where he worked as a singing teacher. He continued composing to the last.

His work is currently undergoing reappraisal as a part of the continuing re-evaluation of ‘Entartete Musik’, and Wolfgang Holzmair undertook a recital of his songs in Munich in 2011, when this live recording was made. Pierrot lunaire, inevitably perhaps, is the centrepiece, though many, I suspect, will find the late (1946) Hafiz cycle the greater work, and be even more struck by the stark group of Rilke settings that brings the disc to a close. Wolf’s influence is very apparent in Pierrot, where fleeting allusions to the Mignon’s ‘So lasst mich scheinen’ mark Kowalski’s hero out as heir to German traditions of Romantic melancholy. Elsewhere, the shifting major-minor tonalities and winding, elusive vocal lines bring him closer to Zemlinsky than anyone else. Holzmair sings it all with an immaculate style that admirably fuses sound and sense, though he sometimes finds Pierrot’s big vocal spans uncomfortably wide. Thérèse Lundquist tackles the accompaniments, some of them almost Lisztian in their complexity, with terrific aplomb.