Hard as it may be in 2021 to read past the sticky paternalism of Richard Dehmel’s best-known poem, early 20th-century readers (male ones, anyway) of ‘Verklärte Nacht’ experienced in it the frisson of ‘a new, anti-bourgeois sexual morality’. Though he could not persuade Mahler, Strauss or Zemlinsky to set his texts to music, Dehmel sought to prevent lesser composers from doing likewise. While his delight and surprise at Schoenberg’s instrumental setting are recorded in a correspondence between the two men, we can only guess at his reaction to Oskar Fried’s lush but more straightforward treatment, staging the nocturnal encounter with the voices of both the penitent woman and the man who promises that their love ‘will transfigure the other’s child; you will bear it for me’. Its second-act Parsifal cadences sound more alien in the context of Fried’s supercharged Brahmsian orchestration and triumphalist ending.

By comparison, Schoenberg’s tone poem is a model of discretion, especially in a performance such as this one that seems so tied to the details and contours of Dehmel’s text. The woman’s vulnerability is caught by Bergen’s solo strings as touchingly as the man’s broad reassurances are underplayed, and the naturalistic touches of their moonlit rapture come over with a delicacy missed by deeper-piled orchestral recordings.

The sole miscalculation in this carefully conceived and entirely original collection of edgy Liebestoden, it seems to me, comes in assigning Korngold’s Songs of Farewell (‘for medium voice’ according to the publisher, and not ‘for tenor’ as the track-list suggests) to Stuart Skelton rather than Christine Rice. The baritonal stretches of the third song demand the most hushed and sympathetic support from Edward Gardner’s direction, which gently points up all of Korngold’s Mahlerian echoes, from the obvious (Das Lied von der Erde) to the peculiar, such as the finale of the Fourth Symphony popping up in the ‘resigned’ but by no means doomed farewell that closes out the album on a lighter note.

However, the opening Fieber finds Skelton in his element, and anyone enlightened (as I was) by Richard Bratby’s cover story on operetta in the December issue will find ample confirmation here of Lehár’s extraordinary versatility. Composed in 1915, midway between Pierrot lunaire and La valse, it paints an expressionist musical canvas of a wounded and delirious soldier in hospital, with fragments of waltz, march, parlando and futile heroic gestures underscored by a sinister fanfare leitmotif. At the height of his fever, he exclaims ‘So you are here as well, mother … what a surprise!’, and it speaks volumes for Skelton and Gardner that the moment sounds more chilling than unintentionally comic.