Tristan and Isolde sharing a delirious ‘Liebestod’ while ascending to a blazing Valhalla? If you occasionally entertain fantasies in which two or more Wagnerian climaxes are conflated, then Schreker is your composer. The trouble is that he is much more hit-and-miss than Wagner, and Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin, his third opera, has substantial weaknesses as well as strengths.

It was first performed in 1913, soon after the run-away success of Der ferne Klang, and the composer can’t be faulted on grounds of ambition, since the subject-matter on which he based his libretto is some way from the highly effective mixture of fantasy and Austro-Hungarian verismo that won Der ferne Klang immediate acclaim. Though also attaching great dramatic and symbolic weight to the power of music (Das Spielwerk being a musical box), Schreker shifts the action into a never-never land of steamy psychological fantasy: a princess maddened by the violin playing of a previous lover finds release when a new arrival in the form of an itinerant workman uses his own musical gifts, as flute player, to ensure a transcendent fulfilment for them both.

At least, this is what seems to happen, but there are several other strands to the tale, and the question of how coherent and well-realised the story is remains open. It’s a pity that Christopher Hailey, who reconstructed the original 1913 version of the opera for this Kiel production, wasn’t invited to tell his tale in the booklet, since a few concrete facts about his editorial work would have been more useful to the listener than the worthy but cloudy cultural history (Nietzsche, Freud, etc) of the essays which are provided.

In June 2001 the Kiel opera company mounted Schreker’s first stage work, Flammen, also conducted by Ulrich Windfuhr, and recorded for CPO (5/02). The live performances of Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin from which this recording derives took place in January this year and, judging by the photographs in the booklet, the production team opted for a relatively basic symbolic setting (a castle already in ruins), while ensuring that costumes and make-up reflected the sinister, surreal aspects of the story.

The singing is variable, with Anne-Carolyn Schlüter and Thomas J Mayer providing the strongest performances. As the ill-matched but determined lovers, Julia Henning and Hans-Jürgen Schöpflin attack the robust emotions of Schreker’s score with appropriate fervour, as well as some vocal unsteadiness. But all the singers, including the chorus, are eventually swept away by the demonic turbulence of Schreker’s orchestra, which unleashes an ecstatic climax after a good deal of fairly routine, but not unduly protracted, late-Romantic musing.

The sound is closely focused and weighted towards the orchestra in the way a studio recording would probably have avoided, but the effect seems appropriate when so much depends on what happens to the music when voices and words disappear. High marks to the CPO/Kiel combination for enterprise, and for providing a full libretto with translation, although at full price for two discs the measure is on the short side.