Dorian has gone to town on the presentation and packaging of this issue, the problem being that this is the third recording of Erwin Stein’s version of the Fourth Symphony to have come my way recently. The piece works surprisingly well on solo string quintet (including double bass), flute doubling piccolo, oboe doubling cor anglais, clarinet doubling bass clarinet, piano, harmonium (!) and percussion. Yet when all is said and done it remains a 1920s anachronism whose revival has more to do with marketing than musicality. Stein’s reduction was prepared at a time when most people, even the members of Arnold Schoenberg’s musical society (VfmP), had limited access to the real thing. Do such arrangements really concentrate the listener’s mind on the music’s essentials or is that just special pleading?

For those in tune with the concept, or at least prepared to meet it halfway, any one of the three discs listed above should make for diverting listening. One doubts whether Schoenberg’s society could ever have experienced playing so crisp or sound so artfully balanced. The Novalis alternative is the least salon-like, thanks to its resonant acoustic, while the decision to use a boy soprano works surprisingly well. On Capriccio, the Linos Ensemble work without a conductor in relatively bright sound; they include Schoenberg’s reduction of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, with Olaf Bär, no less, as soloist.

Kenneth Slowik goes one better than the competition in making his project a three-pronged revivification: the string instruments come from the Smithsonian collection and the performance style is self-consciously modelled on that of Willem Mengelberg, Mahler’s most fervent early advocate and a conductor famous for elastic tempi and interpretative licence. Gut strings are used throughout save for the exaggerated scordatura passages in the scherzo: here Death looms the more threateningly on steel. Some of the portamenti in the slow movement will strike modern listeners as overcooked, but it’s all part and parcel of an experiment in time travel that Slowik has also employed in Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, 2/97). Christine Brandes is suitably cool and bright in the finale. In the coupling, Susan Platts is more ardently expressive than some will like, her delivery varying from covered croon to vibrato-laden shimmer. Sound quality is top-notch.