Back in the 1990s, Walter Braunfels’s 1920 opera The Birds was one of the most glorious rediscoveries in Decca’s ‘Entartete Musik’ series. The Braunfels revival has built at a moderate pace since then, and it’s surely a positive sign that neither of the works here is making its recorded debut, even if, as is claimed, this is the first recording of the Fantastic Apparitions on a Theme of Hector Berlioz to present the work complete.

And what an extraordinary work it is: a set of orchestral variations on the ‘Song of the Flea’ from Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust which grew between 1914 and 1917 from a projected ballet score into a near-50 minute span of orchestral music that references Brahms, Beethoven and Wagner, as well as Berlioz himself. The most obvious parallel is with Reger’s big sets of orchestral variations, or perhaps Braunfels’s own Don Juan. Variation form is expanded far beyond breaking point to become, effectively, a single-movement symphony, complete with finale and a distinctly Mahlerian scherzo (this section is recorded here for the first time).

The performance lacks nothing in commitment or sense of long-range form, though you might find yourself hankering for a more luxurious string sound, slightly sharper characterisation of the individual episodes, and a recorded balance that gives the brass less severity and the bass less boom. Details do tend to get lost. The Sinfonia brevis has the pared-down, otherworldly mood familiar from the post-war works of fellow-Romantics like Dohnányi and Strauss. But it’s charged with genuine pain, and while Gregor Bühl and his Rheinland-Pfalz orchestra serve it well, Johannes Wildner’s more expansive account (Dutton, 8/15) still has the edge on playing and recorded sound.