This fascinating anthology brings together recordings of works by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern made between 1949 and 1965 in the studios of RIAS, the west Berlin-based radio station. A number of works included were then being recorded for the first time; what began as an act of restitution, a project to restore the reputations in Germany of three composers whose music had been condemned as "degenerate" by the Nazis, also became an important documentary archive. It brought together singers and instrumentalists who had worked with all three composers with artists from a new postwar generation who were tackling this repertory for the first time.
Inevitably it's the links with pre-war Vienna that seem the most potent. Eduard Steuermann, who played in the first performance of Pierrot Lunaire in 1912, plays Schoenberg's works for solo piano with wonderful expressive warmth; Peter Stadlen, a former pupil of Webern (and later a music critic for the Daily Telegraph), who gave the European premiere of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, plays it here, too. But perhaps the real highlights are a fabulously idiomatic version of Pierrot Lunaire with Schoenberg scholar Josef Rufer conducting members of the Berlin Philharmonic and reciter Irmen Burmeister balancing the work's expressionism and debts to cabaret perfectly, and Belgian soprano Suzanna Danco's performance of The Book of the Hanging Gardens, which unlocks the sensuousness of Schoenberg's settings of Stefan George in a way that later, more musically scrupulous performances often fail to do.
Schoenberg's music, from the First Chamber Symphony of 1906 to the 1949 Fantasy for violin and piano, dominates the set, but the handful of works by Berg and Webern are well worth hearing. The Vegh Quartet play Berg's Lyric Suite with consummate understanding and instinctive warmth, while Evelyn Lear gives exquisite performances of his two settings (from 1907 and 1925) of Theodor Storm's Schliesse Mir die Augen Beide; Bruno Maderna conducts wonderfully lucid accounts of Webern's Five Orchestral Pieces Op 10. The sound comes up miraculously clean and fresh; it's a real treasure trove for anyone interested in this immensely important chapter in the history of 20th-century music.
