Günter Raphael (1903–60) was a composing prodigy whose First Symphony was premiered by Furtwängler at the age of only 23. His music was also championed by the Busch Quartet, and he became one of the youngest professors at the Leipzig Conservatoire.

In 1934 he was declared a ‘half-Jew’ by the Nazis and was forced from his teaching position in Leipzig, moving to Meiningen where his wife, a pianist, held a teaching position. In 1937 he caught tuberculosis which, paradoxically, was to be the saving of him: confined to hospital during the War years, he continued to compose while his doctors protected him from persecution. After the war he went back to teaching and ended up as professor at the Cologne Musikhochschule, before finally succumbing to the disease which he had fought for so long.

Stylistically his music lies in the mainstream of German Romanticism as refracted through Hindemith. These violin works are strongly melodic and rhythmically vital. The two solo sonatas have echoes of Bach.

The duo Pauline Reguig-Emilio Peroni, founded in 2004, won the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Freunde Junger Musiker prizes in 2007 and the second prize at the Musikpreis 2008 in Rostock, Germany, where Reguig teaches at the Hochschule. All three artists are multiple prize-winners and have substantial performing careers.

First recordings on CD.