In a bold move, the booklet essay compares Franz Schreker’s Der Schatzgräber (first performed in 1920) with Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (first performed in 1919). Even if, as Gavin Plumley argues, the Strauss-Hofmannsthal epic ‘lacked Schreker’s allegorical punch’ (a moot question), its musical and dramatic superiorities are overwhelming. Strauss might have been no more successful than Schreker in adjusting to new operatic times in the 1920s, when Berg, Hindemith, Krenek and Weill came to the fore. But he continued to build more resourcefully on the foundations he’d established before 1915 than Schreker did. After Der ferne Klang and Die Gezeichneten, Der Schatzgräber reveals the limitations of Schreker’s strenuously opulent style which, despite occasional suggestions of simplicity, rarely manages any genuine intensity.

Schreker’s libretto – though full of post-Wagnerian clichés – is effective enough but the characters are melodramatic ciphers. The dramatic theme is the kind of fairy tale involving music that always appealed to Schreker and the various sinister, fantastic and erotic elements that suited his musical idiom are dutifully worked in here. But there is a lack of psychological penetration, of a sufficiently strong sense of the uncanny and the menacing, suggesting that Schreker might simply have been in too much of a hurry to complete the work. The constant, feverish urgings of the orchestra do manage to fire up a suitably ecstatic spirit for the long love duet between Els and Elis that dominates Act 3; elsewhere the music’s lack of harmonic backbone reinforces the prevailing sense of emotional overkill. The Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra make the most of the brief passages of purely orchestral writing and the practised hand of Marc Albrecht ensures as strong a sense of forward motion as this kind of harmonic idiom permits. The recording works well enough on a technical level, though the absence of stage noise suggests that it might have been assembled from rehearsals or unstaged run-throughs. The production photographs in the booklet certainly indicate a very active and physical kind of staging.

Schreker makes considerable demands on his singers and those involved here might be forgiven for relying as much as they do on rather generalised modes of characterisation; the performance nevertheless benefits greatly from the presence of veteran Graham Clark as the Fool and Gordon Gietz in the role of Albi. Manuela Uhl, as Els, the ‘treasure seeker’ of the title, and the opera’s only leading female role, has the kind of ample, very vibrant sound that is difficult to record. The quieter passages are therefore the most effective. Of the other principals, Raymond Very seems too consistently abrasive to convey much of Elis’s romantic vulnerability and (like some of his colleagues in lesser roles) his German can be difficult to follow. The booklet contains an adequate synopsis in English, German and Dutch but it is still a pity to have the libretto in German only.