Pianist Malcolm Martineau is the brilliant initiator of this new one-of-a-kind series on Linn. The Brahms Songbook has set the unprecedented goal to record Brahms’s lieder by complete opus number. In this second instalment, Malcolm is joined by star mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and bass-baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann in five sets that were composed and published over a period of thirty years: op.72, op.105, op.43, op.48 and op.57. In a time when the middle-class was growing, song-writing was both lucrative and pleasurable, offering a myriad of ways to explore perennially popular topics like unrequited love. Yet, in the lieder recorded here, Brahms immerses us in a heightened emotional world, distant from the drawing rooms and concert halls of the bourgeoisie.