Given the limited representation of Schreker’s music in DG’s catalogue, the release of this excellent double album of works by a composer whose operas once rivalled those of Richard Strauss in popularity in the German-speaking world is most welcome. The works included here cover almost the full extent of Schreker’s career, ranging from the Romantic Suite (the Intermezzo of which was composed in 1900 when Schreker was 22) to the Kleine Suite of 1928, written for radio broadcast and scored to accommodate the limitations of the technology at the time.

The playing of the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach is both meticulously prepared and wonderfully idiomatic. The performance of the Romantic Suite is the finest I’ve heard, bringing radiance and emotional depth to a work completed in 1903 before Schreker’s individual style had fully developed. The short but poetic Valse lente of 1908 also enjoys a captivating performance. The refinement and eloquence of the orchestra’s playing are heard to particularly fine effect in the Kammersymphonie of 1916, a work brimming with lyrical invention and bewitchingly scored for a small body of instruments including celesta, harp, piano, harmonium and xylophone.

Both the Five Songs, composed for voice and piano in 1909 and orchestrated in 1922, and Vom ewigen Leben, consisting of a pair of settings of Walt Whitman composed in 1923 and orchestrated in 1927, are melancholy, inward works. The atmosphere that Schreker’s scoring conjures in the second of the Whitman settings is extraordinary, and this profound and haunting work is surely one of the composer’s finest achievements. I marginally prefer Chen Reiss’s performance here to the fine recording by Valda Wilson on Capriccio, while Matthias Goerne delivers a similarly warm and perceptive account of the Five Songs. Incidentally, this is the first recording of this song-cycle sung by a baritone, previous recordings having used Schreker’s alternative option of a female vocalist.

The Nachtstück from Schreker’s second opera Der ferne Klang represents the composer’s music at its richest and most intoxicating. It draws from Eschenbach a performance that’s sumptuous and impassioned but also a touch ponderous. Vassily Sinaisky’s recording of the work for Chandos is only marginally faster but I feel captures the music’s ebb and flow far more persuasively. By contrast, Eschenbach’s interpretation of the Kleine Suite is an unqualified success, surpassing even the recording made by the composer with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1932. With recorded sound of splendid presence and definition, this is altogether a most recommendable release.