Following the release of Friedrich Gernsheim's Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3 so rich in dramatic romanticism, we do not want to deprive you any longer for his Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4. Some passages of this new CD may move many a listener to ask: Is that not Brahms? But then the music goes on to develop a different sound on its own, with original orchestral colors and a precisely formulated structure. It is by a wrongly forgotten composer from the Nibelungen city of Worms who is coming to be regarded as an important romantic symphonist from the period after Mendelssohn and Schumann into the era of Bruckner and Brahms. The Symphony op. 46 premiered by Gernsheim himself in Rotterdam on 16 March 1882 offers a compressed musical language. In some passages, scored with a love for the horn sound, it seems to reflect Brahms's second symphony. However, as a whole, this work is a highly individual composition. Gernsheim composed his fourth and last Symphony op. 62 in Berlin in 1895. Of all his symphonies, it calls for the largest ensemble, with an English horn, bass clarinet, tuba, and cymbals in addition to the usual orchestra of the nineteenth century. In some sections, especially the first movement, this work creates the impression of a continuation of the second symphony while mixing relaxed and orchestrally thinned-out passages with energetic tutti. Woodwind solos and catchy string cantilenas mark the music here as well; the middle segment, a development section, displays Gernsheim's excellence as a symphonist. As the musicologist Dietrich Kämper Stated in MGG in 2002 here Gernsheim exhibits his "consummate command of the compositional means" without "artifice." - CPO (Translated from German text.)