In Britain at least, Peter Cornelius (1824-1874) is best known for his choral music, particularly his epiphany anthem The Three Kings. He was encouraged by Liszt, who introduced him to Wagner and Berlioz, but little of Cornelius's music was published in his lifetime, and of the settings in this first instalment of what's promised as a complete survey of his Lieder, only his Six Songs Op 1, composed in 1853, appeared soon after they were written. Cornelius described himself as a "poet-musician" and wrote his own song texts in a slightly nondescript German romantic style, and set similarly to a music that owes most, in the early songs at least, to Mendelssohn and Schumann, with Liszt's influence only emerging later. The most striking of the six sets here is Cornelius's Op 3, Trauer und Trost (Mourning and Consolation), with its tightly organised cyclic construction and motivic obsessions. It's sung with fierce concentration by the tenor Markus Schäfer, but both the soprano Christina Landshamer and the baritone Mathias Hausmann are very fine too, and make the most of what opportunities Cornelius's music offers them.