This CD recording of Schoenberg’s most substantial dramatic work appears in the same year that Welsh National Opera gave the opera its first British production in half a century. Derived from four concert performances in different German, Swiss and French locations in September 2012, it doesn’t attempt to match the acoustic ambience of a live staging but it still provides a strongly dramatic as well as musically convincing reading of this challenging score.

Schoenberg’s libretto extends over three acts. Although he completed the first two quite quickly, during 1930 32, the music for Act 3 was never written. The first two scenes plunge the listener into the opera’s most complex textures, with scene 2 exposing the incompatibility between the speaking Moses and the singing Aron by superimposing their very different lines of text. Here the recording is particularly effective in its balancing of the disparities, always managing to convey the forceful lyricism that makes Schoenberg’s fervent response to the biblical drama so much more than mere eye-music. As the work proceeds, dramatic intensity increasingly outweighs textural complexity, Act 2 progressing from the predominantly orchestral depiction of the ‘Dance round the Golden Calf’ to the stark confrontation between the brothers. Here superimposition is no longer used; their extended dialogue ends as Aron leaves with the Jewish people and Moses remains behind in solitary despair, his final broken phrases in dialogue with a supremely eloquent string line. Had the music for Act 3 been written, the effect (with Aaron’s death and Moses’s clinching declaration of theological rectitude) would have been very different but it is difficult to feel that it could have been musically more satisfying.

Franz Grundheber and Andreas Conrad sustain their complementary roles with all the necessary conviction; and although a larger and more assertive chorus might have been desirable, the total ensemble is well defined and dramatically engaged throughout, with all the smaller vocal parts well taken. Sylvain Cambreling brings out the extraordinarily intense austerity of the dialogue scenes and ensures that the luridly pictorial aspects of the ‘Dance round the Golden Calf’ are never over-emphasised. This imposing, intriguing opera is one of the most powerful contributions to 20th-century musical modernism and this recording does it justice.