This CD features the first complete recording ever of the cello sonatas of the Worms late romanticist Friedrich Gernsheim (1839-1916), with encores in the form of his only two cello pieces with piano. For the virtuoso parts in his three cello sonatas, Gernsheim could draw on his own brilliant piano technique, which he had demonstrated already in 1850 as an eleven-year-old child prodigy. The five works span five decades. The Sonata in D minor op.12 from 1868 continues to follow the paths of Mendelssohn’s two sonatas, while the Sonata in E minor op.79 of 1906 is a dramatically charged work in the style of the turn of the century. The cello composition Elohenu of 1881 and the Andante op.64bis from 1898 are situated between them chronologically.

Two years prior to his death Gernsheim reworked the last movement of his Sonata in E minor and wrote two completely new movements for the first and second positions. The result was the Sonata in E minor op.87 of 1914, the seventy-five-year-old composer’s farewell to his epoch on the eve of World War I.