Only a few Austrian composers (Webern, for example) elected to stay in their homeland after Nazi Germany annexed the country in 1938. Of those who left, some went to America (Schoenberg) while others went to England (Egon Wellesz). Whether they stayed or left, Austrian composers continued to write distinctly Austrian music in their own distinctive voices. In this disc of Wellesz's 1933 Piano Concerto and 1961 Violin Concerto, the musical language remains the same, fundamentally tonal in harmony, though with strong chromatic and atonal accents and essentially romantic in style, though with a dash more irony and a dollop more anguish. Both pieces are given exemplary performances by conductor Roger Epple leading the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Margarete Babinsky as the soloist in the Piano Concerto and David Frühwirth in the Violin Concerto.

With the exception of listeners who seem afflicted with an addiction for giga-obscure repertoire, such items as Hungaraton's Hans Koessler, Emanuel Moór: Chamber Works would normally register only as an automatic "pass-me-by" choice when found in the bins of classical music retail outlets. If your taste runs to Romantic chamber music, however, you should not overlook this one. The key piece here is the remarkable Sonata No. 2 for cello & piano, Op. 55, by Emanuel Moór, written in 1900 for cellist Anatoli Brandukov, the dedicatee of Rachmaninov's Cello Sonata and Glazunov's Chant du ménéstral.