With a programme of chamber works drawn from both ends of Bruch’s long composing career, members of The Nash Ensemble once more reveal a neglected side of the composer’s output.

Few genres are as hallowed as landscape painting, its very popularity immune to changes of artistic style, technique and fashion. Across all centuries and cultures, artists have sought to interpret the environment in or around which they live. David Hockney's recent exhibition at the Royal Academy, The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, reminds us that the tradition remains alive and well in the twenty-first century, even where the artist’s medium is an iPad, rather than canvas, brushes and oil paint.

On the face of it, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) is an unlikely proponent of what is often thought of as a conservative genre. Schiele had been arrested on a charge of pornography in 1912, and it is his unsettling, explicit nudes for which he remains best known—even notorious—today (and which have lost none of their power over the intervening years). But our cover image of four trees at sunset, refracted through an Expressionist prism of colour and stylization, demonstrates another aspect of Schiele's extraordinary originality. It proves the perfect match for a programme of works drawn from both ends of Bruch's long composing career, the starkly Expressionist painting providing an astringent foil to the music's rich Romanticism. A Schiele landscape also graces the cover of The Nash Ensemble's earlier Bruch album (CDA68168), to similar effect.

The long creative life enjoyed by Bruch—born in 1838, he lived until 1920—was cruelly denied to Schiele. He died aged just twenty-eight, the victim of an earlier pandemic: the Spanish flu killed him along with his pregnant wife, Edith, in 1918.