I may be suffering withdrawal symptoms from lack of concert-going, but this enterprising programme would feel right at home in a chamber music festival (MOMA in New York hosted one with the same title in 1986). Earnest introductory talks, slide shows and post-concert confabulations would join the dots between Brahms and Berg and sketch a picture of a city genteelly engaged in a cultural civil war conducted between representatives of a proudly ordered past and an unsettling future, with Schoenberg the double agent at their centre.

Making do with digital sound-files, Alpha’s concise booklet essay and a glass of Grüner Veltliner, I found the musicians – formed around a trio of current and former Berlin Philharmonic members – more at home in the avant-garde world of Berg and Schoenberg on disc 2 than in the retrospective Romanticism of Korngold and Zemlinsky on disc 1. The big surprise and most winning performance comes at the programme’s fulcrum between them, with Mahler at his most Straussian (Johann, that is) in a pair of Lieder arranged for Emmanuel Pahud. Éric Le Sage applies the subtlest nudges of rubato here and in a dreamy account of Berg’s Sonata that leads naturally into the languid sensibility of the Op 5 clarinet pieces. Webern’s quintet arrangement of his master’s Chamber Symphony inevitably mutes its colours, like a Kandinsky canvas viewed in black and white, while underlining its Brahmsian origins, especially in such a tonally opulent performance.

Seventeen fast-moving years separate the trios on disc 1 though you’d never know it, so precociously accomplished is the 12-year-old Korngold’s emulation and updating of Austro-German Romantic tropes. Here the ensemble’s refined articulation and playful phrase shapes lend a distinctly French accent, usefully pointing up affinities with early Debussy and late Chausson while withholding the directional impetus and riper vibrato of the Beaux Arts Trio (Philips), let alone the yearning expression of Glenn Dicterow, Alan Stepansky and Israela Margalit (EMI/Warner). The ruminative side of the Zemlinsky is beautifully caught, but the same musicianly discretion, bringing out the tenderness in the Adagio of Berg’s Chamber Concerto, also restrains its moments of rapture. At my putative festival concert I’d find much pleasure and food for thought; at home, tempted by an array of alternatives, my feelings are more mixed.