Eisler: Hollywood Songbook. Matthias Goerne (baritone), Eric Schneider (piano) (Decca)

The Hollywood Songbook was compiled in the uncomfortable years of Hanns Eisler's exile on the West Coast of the US, before the attentions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities forced his departure. One has to admire a composer who faced down the following accusation by an investigator: "The purpose is to show that Mr Eisler is the Karl Marx of Communism in the musical field and he is well aware of it", with: "I would be flattered." It was his long-time friend, Brecht, who provided most of the texts. For Brecht, "his setting was what performance would be for a play: the test. He reads with enormous exactitude." The songs (46 in all) are preoccupied with exile, the music tart, sometimes bitter, yet fluid and wide-ranging in style, its potency distilled with acuity and often disarming reserve by Goerne and Schneider.

By Michael Dervan

Zemlinsky: String Quartets 1 & 2. Artis Quartet (Nimbus)

Alexander Zemlinsky's major chamber work, his String Quartet No. 2 (19131914), reveals the strong influence of his one-time, informal pupil, Arnold Schoenberg. The Artis Quartet of Vienna show less interest in charting the piece's harmonic tensions or structure than in imparting it with a soft tonal ripeness, a decadent concern for moment-by-moment expressive indulgence (the programme note by Antony Beaumont delineates the work as a history of Zemlinsky and Schoenberg's tangled relationship). By contrast, the lighter, brighter First Quartet of 1896, simpler in idiom, shows the influence of Brahms, who had taken the young Zemlinsky under his wing and ensured the early publication of his music.

By Michael Dervan

Glenn Gould plays Brahms (Sony Classical). Glenn Gould Silver Jubilee Album (Sony Classical, two CDs)

This is the first official release of Glenn Gould's notorious 1962 NYPO performance of Brahms's First Piano Concerto. Conductor Leonard Bernstein made a disclaimer from the podium, disassociating himself from Gould's approach, particularly with regard to tempo. In truth, it's not the speeds which make Gould's playing so lumpy, rather his out-of-sorts-ness with the basic character of the piece. He was, he said, in baroque mode at the time, and only doffs his leaden boots in the finale. The 1980 Golden Jubilee Album, including the famous So You Want to Write a Fugue?, ranges from eccentric indulgence (a prolonged, fake panel discussion, Gould taking all the parts himself), to revelatory music-making (some late Scriabin and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in Strauss's Ophelia Songs).

By Michael Dervan