Although fundamentally a late romantic, Schreker was friendly with both Alban Berg (who prepared the vocal score of Schreker’s opera Der ferne Klang and whose own Wozzeck was influenced by it) and Schoenberg (in a jovial letter to the colleague who had premiered his Gurrelieder he looked forward to a day when people would stop calling them both ‘modernists’ and recognize them as ‘romantics’). It must have been more, surely, than Schreker’s occasional use of bitonality and crunchy dissonance that inspired this warmth. One reason might be his quite remarkable Chamber Symphony, in which he does not so much change his style to suit reduced orchestral forces (23 solo instruments: the accompanying booklet is wrong about this and, in the English mis-translation, about a good deal else) as re-think it quite radically. The resulting textures are not only enchantingly fresh (and by no means devoid of Schreker’s habitual opulence) but there is a real sense of him delightedly discovering new and fascinating sonorities. He may have taken a leaf or two out of the book of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, written ten years earlier, but many more from the frequent chamber textures of late Mahler. It is a lovely work, and beautifully performed.
Mahler’s version for string orchestra of Schubert’s D minor Quartet was made, no doubt, to spread greater knowledge of the work when public concerts of chamber music were rarer than they are now. But massed strings can have nothing of the personal expressiveness of a solo line, and massed high violins are apt to sound glaring. The only reason for playing this arrangement nowadays, surely, is to try to evoke the way that Mahler would have played it, and this is precisely what Welser-Most does. There is much rubato – the coda to the first movement is approached with mysterious slowness and ends almost motionless – and the most is made of what a string orchestra can do but a quartet cannot: sheer power, extremes of dynamic contrast and colour; the theme of the slow movement is not so much chorale-like as intensely expressive. It’s the most convincing case I’ve yet heard for this arrangement; at times it really does sound like Mahler performing Schubert. Which is not to say that it always sounds like Schubert. Good recordings, the Schreker especially.'