What is the point of arranging music? To bring a work to a wider audience (when Beethoven and Brahms domesticated their symphonies); to tailor it to the gifts of a performer, often the arranger themselves, such as Kreisler or Rachmaninov; to simplify or analyse the original for private purposes. Yet the aims of Schoenberg in founding the Society for Private Musical Performance in 1919 ran counter to all these principles. In fact the Schatz-Walzer performed here was worked up by Webern to raise funds through a benefit concert in May 1921. All in vain; the Society closed within six months.

Nonetheless, the arrangement is consciously restrained, abjuring both the solo woodwinds available for the occasion and the contented breadth of the original with its march-band percussion. Schoenberg arranged the Emperor Waltz four years later for a Pierrot lunaire ensemble and in so doing soured some of its creamy harmonies with that work’s edgy, hysterical nature. And when Erwin Stein worked on Mahler’s Fourth at Schoenberg’s behest, he knew that there was no need to clarify textures in a symphony where every instrumental colour is already ‘a means of characterisation rather than sonority’. What had first enthralled him as a teenager, as Mahler’s music did so many of us, was its ‘total lack of academicism…so novelistic, adventurous and thrilling’.

Sensitivity to these contexts is a distinguishing mark of all three performances. The festival atmosphere heightens contrasts even if the Austrian radio recording picks up more bass and piano than the much-maligned harmonium which would otherwise lend sweetness to thinned-out, deracinated textures. Too many other recordings of Stein’s version succeed only in sounding like mini-Mahler. This dares to go further, to narrow the gap between the original and Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony.

The only one to touch it is a recent recording from the Spannungen festival, given by a similarly ‘all-star’ ensemble: the parody even more raw and fierce in the Scherzo, the Poco adagio slightly frenetic, even stressful, and Christiane Oelze a pale Pierrot in the finale. I prefer the more properly Viennese nature of the Salzburg performance, which is as immaculately polished as it is sly and affectionate by turns. The second-movement waltz makes no less a phantasmagoric caricature of its genre than Ravel’s two-faced tribute. Christiane Karg’s soprano falls more gratefully on the ear than Oelze’s calculated pitch-bending; as a vivid and touching storyteller, she (perhaps wisely) leaves most of the setting’s subversive nudges and winks to her instrumental colleagues, who play as if on the edge on their seats. Applause is deservedly retained.