Music in the stream of life? Mutually reflective or separate worlds? I’d say the former, as anyone who has experienced a Proustian moment when a certain piece, even a particular musical phrase, sparks a significant memory. And there are cases where music lends emotional and/or moral support to people who need it most, as the Jewish pianist Igor Levit does by devoting his proceeds from the sale of his latest album to “two wonderful organisations that work in my hometown here in Berlin to help people who experience anti-Semitism and to avoid young people avoid falling into the clutches of anti-Semitism.” The music chosen a sequence of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words and Charles-Valentin Alkan’s eerie Song of the mad woman on the sea shore, (Sony Classical 19658878982, c£13:50) where a meandering high octave melody sings atop solemn dark, low chords before briefly flying off the handle then reposing exhausted, the woman’s head resting in her hands in utter despair. What does this music represent? You could imagine a boat nearby where the woman, made mad through grieving, is about to join fellow refugees fleeing the anti-Semitic land where up to now she has lived, happily. Mendelssohn’s adorable miniatures make up the main body of the programme, whether Venetian Gondola Songs, or songs without titles, all given by Levit with a fluid touch and a refreshing lack of affectation. This is a sublime, idealistic world, the death of which (I’m imagining) sent the woman by the sea shore mad ….. coming from Leipzig maybe, where Mendelssohn’s statue was wilfully pulled down, removed by a gang of Nazi sympathisers two years exactly before the notorious pogroms of Kristallnacht. So you have a Jewish maverick – Alkan – anticipating, in theory of course, the expulsion of a Lutheran-Jewish composer. It’s a humbling programme released in support of a worthy cause.

Journeying further into the anti-Semitic maelstrom, Riga-born violinist Gidon Kremer had a Jewish father who survived the Holocaust and being the universalist he is, draws on a wealth of personal experience to enrich his considerable art as a musician. Among the many unusual composers he has championed over the decades is Warsaw-born (and Jewish) Mieczysław Weinberg, described by the conductor Thomas Sanderling as, “a great discovery. Tragically, a discovery, because he didn’t gain much recognition within his lifetime besides from a circle of insiders in Russia,” others have called him “the third great Soviet composer, along with Prokofiev and Shostakovich”. Kremer’s cd Songs of Fate (ECM  4859850, c£13.50) with his ensemble Kremerata Baltica includes a number of Weinberg’s pieces, the Nocturne for violin and orchestra being among the gentlest, the Aria perhaps the most beautiful. The Latvian composer Giedrius Kuprevicius’s Chamber Symphony ‘The Star of David’ is represented in excerpt, ‘The Luminous Lament’ with soprano Vida Miknevičiūtė being charged with atmosphere, also two settings of music from the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish. But for me the disc’s most entrancing tracks are the first and the last, Raminta Serksnyte’s evocative ‘This Too Shall Pass’ (violin, cello, vibraphone and chamber orchestra) and Jekabs Jancevskis’s Lignum (string orchestra, svilpaunieki [traditional Latvian instruments], chimes and wind chimes). Jancevskis (b1992) is the youngest composer represented. His piece suggests a Mahlerian variant on modernism, desolate, lonely, deeply expressive, yet profoundly intimate. This sort of private, inwards-looking production is typical of ECM-founder Manfred Eicher’s sound world. At around the six minute mark pizzicato strings suggest a passing shower before the tension mounts and Mahlerian portamenti, or slides, lift us shoulder high into a brighter world. It’s pure magic, the shofar-like svilpaunieki marking the specific space where the music was born. The work closes on quiet high strings, next to silent in fact, like a soft wind reaching through ancient, cracked window frames.

Lignum is the work of a gifted 25-years-old – someone to keep an eye on, obviously – whereas Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s String Sextet (superbly played by the Nash Ensemble, Hyperion CDA68406, c£12.25) was written by a budding genius while in his mid-teens. How is it then possible that a mere kid could summon feelings of such depth and sophistication? The Adagio is, again, Mahlerian – meaning not that it sounds like Mahler, but that it feels like Mahler. Seasoned fans of Korngold’s genius will know what to expect, or should I say know never to expect the obvious.The coupling is Tchaikovsky’s frisky and tuneful Souvenir de Florence, a lovely piece but child’s play next to the dazzlingly original Korngold. Maybe you can tell me this: how come the Nazis, who claimed such hatred on ‘degenerate’ music, could ban a score such as Korngold’s Sextet – which they by rights should have been proud of – and celebrate instead real musical decadence such as Strauss’s Salome? I’m not saying that Salome isn’t a remarkable composition, but am I missing something? An obvious answer I know, but the further you walk away from it the more ludicrous it seems.