You would be hard-put to know from listening to Pelleas und Melisande, even from following the score, that Schoenberg really did have it in mind to tell a story, tell Maeterlinck’s story, no less directly than when setting Robert Dehmel without words in Verklärte Nacht. In this regard, the Bergen Philharmonic have performed an estimable service. Notwithstanding the outstandingly spacious Chandos engineering, turn first to the live concert film made freely available (for now) at the orchestra’s bergenphilive.no site. Quite apart from the pleasure of watching as well as hearing Edward Gardner draw out all the lyricism of Schoenberg at his most Italianate, there is invaluable instruction in the form of concise subtitles which outline motifs, characters and events as they occur.

Informed in this way, the achievement of the studio recording becomes all the more appreciable for its extra precision and naturalism. Gardner is swift but never careless, and details such as Melisande’s ring in the fountain or Golaud falling from the horse take on greater musical as well as dramatic significance when paced as if to accompany the scene itself.

Erwartung also carries over the atmosphere of a live performance – when it was enterprisingly coupled with Beethoven’s Ninth – but even without it the performance would hold exceptional appeal, for Sara Jakubiak’s intense restraint, her conversational familiarity with the text and the luminous rapture of her singing, as though her own part were the moonlight and the orchestral accompaniment the forest through which The Woman wanders and stumbles. In these regards her only rival on record is Anja Silja for Decca (6/81, not the later remake on Naxos, 11/08); and yet there is a centre to Jakubiak’s voice, to her refusal of total neurosis and abandon, that I find even more sympathetic, especially paired with the paler, more understated colours of Gardner’s accompaniment when set against the Vienna Philharmonic and Dohnányi, like a Schiele and a Klimt side by side. For this coupling it’s an obvious first choice, but also a first port of call for anyone still resistant to the idea that Expressionist Schoenberg can, and should, sound beautiful.