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This fourth disc in the Naxos series of the complete Schumann Lieder focuses on settings of poems by Justinus Kerner, whose almost folk-song-like lyrics first captured Schumann’s imagination as early as 1828 in the five Jugend-Lieder.

The works on this recording span Varèse’s entire career, containing his sole surviving early composition, Un Grand Sommeil Noir, and his last, unfinished work, Nocturnal, brilliantly and seamlessly completed by the composer’s disciple and assistant during the last seventeen years of his life, the composer Chou Wen-Chung.

Thomas Stacy is widely known through his recordings, television appearances and as cor anglais player with the New York Philharmonic. He also has a passion for playing the English horn’s smaller relative, the oboe d’amore.

The suite that Copland extracted from The Tender Land is in three movements, with the second and third linked without pause. The 1926 Piano Concerto, like Gershwin’s Concerto of the previous year, is a 1920s 'New York' piece - brassy, exuberant, ever confident in its bluesy swagger.

Now enjoying cult status since her ‘re-discovery’ twenty five years ago, Hildegard von Bingen, the tenth child of an aristocratic family, entered a convent at the age of eight and spent the remainder of her eighty years as a nun as well as a mystic, the latter half as abbess of her own convent.