Schreker was at his best in opera‚ but his orchestral and other vocal works merit exploration. They share the stylistic middle ground between Strauss and Schoenberg with the likes of Pfitzner‚ Zemlinsky – even Siegfried Wagner – and the second disc in Chandos’s Schreker survey covers a lot of ground‚ from what is virtually a student exercise‚ written in the early years of the 20th century‚ to a substantial composition from 1933‚ near the end of Schreker’s life. It’s a brave composer who sets a text which speaks of ‘dead‚ grey monotony’‚ and these works are not exactly notable for strong contrasts of pace and atmosphere. The Five Songs‚ written for voice and piano in 1909 and orchestrated in 1922‚ have little lightness to balance the shade‚ but they are neither monotonous nor dead‚ and Katarina Karnéus shines in music which responds to dark emotions with exemplary restraint. The two mature orchestral Preludes‚ to the opera Das Spielwerk and to an unnamed large­scale opera‚ are a good deal more robust and emphatic. The latter is the largest and most ambitious‚ and although it begins promisingly‚ with brisk tempos and an almost Szymanowski­esque exoticism‚ it moves decisively into hyper­ romantic agonising long before the end. Such a mood is more acceptable in the Romantic Suite‚ since Schreker was only 25 when he completed it‚ in 1903. This is one of those large­scale late­Romantic works which has the proportions of a symphony without the matching intensity of argument. Even so‚ there is a deft scherzo in which it’s interesting to hear a large orchestra managing to be light on its feet‚ and the finale has sufficient sweep and sharpness of thematic profile to provide a rousing conclusion. Anyone who has the first volume of the Chandos Schreker series (6/00) will know what to expect from this one: the qualities of performance and recording remain high.