Two months younger than Johannes Brahms, whom he outlived by around five years, Caspar Joseph Brambach was once able to bask in the knowledge that he had attracted considerable attention. He had studied and taught at the Cologne Conservatory and worked as music director in Bonn for eight years before devoting himself primarily to his own work, in which vocal music played the largest role. His male choruses were particularly well received, but his instrumental works were also popular, as the Rhinelander Brambach left no doubt that the masters of Romanticism, above all Robert Schumann, played an essential role in his sensibility. In addition to the Sextet for piano and strings from the last Cologne and early Bonn period (around 1860), this first recording contains the three Piano Quartets, the last of which the composer wrote shortly before the turn of the century.