This pair of one-off live performances relives and condenses the battle over music in the second half of the 19th century, a battle in which Brahms unwisely involved himself by signing (and possibly writing) a manifesto against Liszt and ‘The Music of the Future’. With no one to tell him otherwise, Schoenberg seems to have decided there was no conflict worth perpetuating, or that he was the man to achieve a synthesis.

The dryness of the first violin-playing in Verklärte Nacht belongs to the effect of the performance as a whole, which majors on delicate tracery and does not attempt to compete with the weight of sonority afforded by the expanded version. More flowing tempi are well handled by the reduced forces to create a livelier impression than the sober elegies of Holliger and Karajan (quite different from each other in their ways), closely fitted to Dehmel’s overheated poetry as Schoenberg appears to have intended. One understands why Schoenberg made the arrangement but it’s fascinating to be reminded what he had in mind – not a smudged Wagnerian tone-poem but a marriage of Brahmsian process with Lisztian narrative.

If stories lie behind Brahms’s instrumental music, the composer went to every effort to withhold them from us. These days, we have to know everything. He wrote the D major Serenade as a nonet, then orchestrated it and destroyed the original, which Alan Boustead reconstructed ‘in the 1980s’, according to Kenneth Woods’s booklet-note. The Minuets and first Scherzo hardly lose by the transcription, and allow us to hear some felicities of Baroque rhetoric in what was then a new context. It’s the long first movement and Adagio that want the accumulation of expressive weight not available here. The second Scherzo seems to run away, which may be an illusion caused by the lack of timpani, or the horn and strings playing ahead of the beat. More problematic is the distant recording perspective, which does little justice to a performance full of the familiar Brahmsian ache, for all its D major, outdoorsy humour.