The problematic performance here is the Kaddish Symphony (1963). As the booklet-notes remind us, Bernstein went through considerable torment to get the text right for his piece, deciding to take on the task himself after other writers failed to deliver, and revising his original thoughts in 1977. This performance is the premiere of a new version by Samuel Pisar, an international law expert and survivor of Auschwitz, who was also a close friend of Bernstein’s.

In the symphony’s original incarnation, the narrator argues with God in a continuing search for faith after the evils visited on the Jewish race during the 20th century. The key to the work is this counterpoint between Bernstein’s theological argument and its musical embodiment as a dialectical clash between atonality and tonality. Bernstein’s text dealt with the debate in the widest possible context but I’m not convinced that Pisar’s decision to re-focus the piece specifically around the Holocaust makes enough musical sense, although one respects his motives. When in the introductory narration Pisar breaks the fourth wall by name-checking “the symphony by my friend Leonard Bernstein” already it’s too knowing; as the performance progresses, the synergy between text and music becomes haphazard where once there was powerful symbolism.

The performance by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra under John Axelrod is solid rather than spectacular, and Bernstein’s own second recording remains definitive. Elsewhere Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw gets a taut reading, while David Drew’s reconstruction of Weill’s Berlin Requiem is revealed as a lost gem.