Frank Bungarten has taken on a significant task: an entire album of works by legendary Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. The composer's music is lush, complex, and richly textured, which is not a surprise given that Villa-Lobos was classically trained. But Villa-Lobos also incorporated inspiration from music of native Brazilian peoples and African cultures, so one cannot consider him purely a formal art music composer. Thus it takes a very skilled musician to be able to technically master the music and to convey the emotion and rhythms. Bungarten is perhaps most successful in the first set of works, Suite populaire brésilienne, which is a set of five dances.

While it is always wonderful to have a recording of Schumann's early C minor Piano Quartet coupled with his mature E flat major Piano Quartet, the result of that coupling is usually only half a disc of listenable music. Because while the E flat major quartet is surely one of the masterpieces of the repertoire, the C minor quartet is, as its composer once sadly described it, "botched." The reason for this is straight-forward. The E flat quartet written when Schumann was 32 has the passion of youth joined with the technique of maturity, while the C minor quartet written when the composer was 19 has the passion of youth expressed without temperance – or indeed, competence.