Post-Karajan, perhaps, performances of Verklärte Nacht have been getting slower and slower, wringing out ever more juice from its pages, seemingly in search of a sublime melancholy. There is much to be said for an alternative approach, embodied by the youthful exuberance of the Kaleidoscope Collective, who evoke instead the unfettered, 20-something exhilaration of Schoenberg’s response to Richard Dehmel’s poem. Returning to the original sextet version will always encourage us to hear the piece through the filter of Brahms, it’s true, but the sinewy tone and forthright attack of Elena Urioste and her colleagues usher the listener back to Dehmel’s poem (helpfully printed in the booklet) and to the precise, Wagner-ohne-Worte correspondence between notes and text.

The sextet is placed at the climax of a programme devised with a satisfyingly progressive logic as an imaginary evening c1901 spent in the company of Vienna’s musical luminaries and would-be revolutionaries. Overwhelmingly present by his literal absence, Mahler is there, fidgeting during the four lieder by his fiancée Alma while her teacher Zemlinsky nods approvingly at lessons learnt and put in practice. Such fancies aside, the dark mezzo tints employed here by Francesca Chiejina would make her a magnificent Wood-Dove in Gurrelieder. She also covers her voice and steps back from the microphone most effectively in the closing bars of Alma’s ‘Erntelied’.

The sighing head-motif of Verklärte Nacht runs through the opening, substantial fragment of Zemlinsky, suggesting either that Schoenberg knew Maiblumen blühten überall in its unfinished state or (more likely) that both composers were drawing on a lexicon of chromatic harmony and aching suspensions that had become ubiquitous in fin de siècle Vienna. Debussy and Stravinsky had lost patience with this kind of mooning around some time earlier, and Webern was on the cusp of doing so in 1907 when he wrote the first movement of a projected Piano Quintet. Tonally more opulent and slightly broader in phrasing, never overplaying Webern’s ‘modernity’ at this stage of his development, the Kaleidoscope performance scores over some distinguished rivals on record, especially in Tom Poster’s articulation and sympathetic balancing of the piano part.