Eugene Asti’s pioneering Mendelsson Songs and Duets series, containing a large amount of first recordings and rarities, concludes with this fifth volume, a generous two CDs for the price of one. The contents range from Mendelssohn’s first extant composition of any kind – a birthday song presented to his father by the precocious ten-year-old composer – to settings of the German romantic poets Schiller, Goethe and Eichendorff,which place Mendelssohn firmly in the canon of the great Lieder composers.

These works are performed by a talented group of young singers who will be familiar from other discs in the series, including the winner of the 2008 Kathleen Ferrier prize, Katherine Broderick.