The two big works here were written 37 years apart‚ at the beginning of Zemlinsky’s public career and towards the end of it (he lived for eight years after the Sinfonietta but had few performances thereafter). The Symphony is rooted in Brahms and especially Dvo·ák‚ while the Sinfonietta is the most brilliant‚ astringent and concise work of Zemlinsky’s maturity‚ yet the same personality is clearly present in both. The Symphony‚ for all its ample length‚ is both astonishingly economical in its fertile development of very brief cells and immensely likeable in its contradictions of expectation. Even the finale‚ whose 26 variations on a very brief theme could easily seem protracted‚ consistently entertains with its sheer cleverness. Such features as the scherzo’s bracing syncopations and the almost rustic pastoral vein touched on by the slow movement are immediately appealing‚ but it is the sort of work that reveals more of itself and its already prodigiously gifted creator on repeated hearing. The Sinfonietta‚ written at the height of Zemlinsky’s greatest success and on the brink of his downfall (1934 was the year of the Nazis’ ban on ‘degenerate’ art) is an extraordinary blend of nervous exuberance and black humour; its slow movement is a dark but curiously gentle funeral march‚ its climax bitter but not ‘tragic’ – defiant‚ rather. No one has studied these scores with more sympathy than Antony Beaumont (all are performed in editions corrected by him; the Prelude to ‘Es war einmal…’ has its middle section restored for the first time since Mahler excised it)‚ but he was a conductor before he was a Zemlinsky scholar and his readings are powerfully convincing and uncommonly well played. The recording‚ if a little dense in a couple of pages of the Symphony‚ gives a good sense of the acoustic of the Rudolfinum in Prague‚ where Zemlinsky himself conducted so often.