The only connection between these two composers is their victimisation and the last syllable of their names. Both were silenced for political reasons; neither has found due recognition. Samuil Feinberg (1890-1962), raised in cosmopolitan Odessa, was invalided out of the first world war and settled for a teaching post at the Moscow Conservatoire. His solo career as a pianist was curtailed by Stalinism and he lived out a life of near-total obscurity, known only for being the first pianist in the USSR to give a public recital of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The three works on this album are dated 1912 to…

I am about to break another rule. When I confined myself to reviewing just one album of the week around 15 years ago, I declared there would be no three-star reviews. Three is a cop-out. If it’s a great or good record it deserves four or five. Anything else I will only write about if, weak as it is, there is something instructive about its failure. So this week we have a three-star: why? Because it’s Zemlinsky and he’s caught between two stools. Like others of his generation, Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) was torn between late-romanticism and atonality, so he…

Let me take you into the process by which new releases get selected for review – at least by me who for years has reviewed just one album a week. The process is not scientific, but I’ll describe it as best I can. Monday morning I face two towering piles of CDs. First, I reject the known knowns – famous artists recording familiar repertoire, and probably not for the first time. They won’t have much to say that changes the state of my world. Then it’s the turn of the unknown unknowns, where both the composer and artist are extremely…