While Metamorphosen may be the finest music here, lending its name to yet another distinctive album from John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London, the unusual couplings are especially welcome. Not that the team play it safe in Franz Schreker or Erich Wolfgang Korngold any more than they do in Richard Strauss, offering visceral engagement in lieu of the nostalgic poignancy implied by words such as ‘intermezzo’ and ‘serenade’. As in their recent collection of ‘English Music for Strings’ (2/21), the recorded sound is exceptionally immediate. Despite the aura of ecclesiastical resonance we are close enough to register the rosiny scrunch of bow against string, as well as some heavy intakes of breath.

Schreker’s turn-of-the-century Intermezzo was his earliest calling card. Straightforwardly Romantic, Brahms meets Grieg, it is beautifully turned here, albeit more than usually urgent with a destabilising hint of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht.

The label’s previous version of Korngold’s Symphonic Serenade was made at the time of the work’s belated UK premiere under Matthias Bamert. Decently played by the BBC Philharmonic – like Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp the score is self-defeatingly difficult – that reading feels relatively cautious though always cogent (Chandos, 3/97). Wilson’s razzle-dazzle rethink will delight admirers but in truth the choice is not clear-cut. Determined to banish charges of sentimentality and expose the spikier inner workings of Korngold’s invention, the conductor emphasises dislocation at the expense of lyricism, rarely content with old-world geniality. Sonorities are sharp and brilliant, leaner than might have been expected. Only Simone Pittau and a woozier-sounding LSO (ASV, 2/07) offer a string complement seemingly as full as that intended by the composer: the Vienna Philharmonic gave the work’s under-prepared first performance under Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1950. Wilson ensures that the frankly Mahlerian slow movement has plenty of space and dignity. The problem, if such it be, is clearest in the finale, where the main body of the movement is articulate but rushed. The return of the first movement’s opening theme, a pulling together of motivic and emotional threads, is as much somnambulistic as affectionate.

I have not left space to do full justice to the Strauss, which offers closely observed, vibrant string tone, initially at a deliberate tempo, later thrillingly and a little coarsely driven. Excitable stringendo waves of euphoria and anguish cut loose from any notion of this as old man’s music. These militant, tightly controlled, sometimes breathtaking performances demand to be heard and may divide opinion.