If only Brahms and Schoenberg had really met, rather than through the tenuous agency of Zemlinsky. “That’s how it’s done, from Bach to me,” Brahms remarked to Zemlinsky while they were looking at a Mozart Quintet. Schoenberg said much the same, and in this striking coupling they do meet – around 1885, I’d say, when Schoenberg was 11 and Brahms was 52. From its subdued introduction onwards, this Verklärte Nacht seems directly to oppose (how Schoenbergian) the old Viennese slight that it sounded like a page of Tristan with the ink smeared. The confession theme is delicately elaborated, and with purer tone than we often hear. The move to E major (6'47") brings a feeling of space rather than an actual broadening of tempo, and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta’s phrasing is internally supple throughout an interpretation that yields little in intensity to older, weighty recordings. I’d even place it in the same league as the Brahms-Schoenberg encounter brokered by an ailing Karajan, live at the Royal Festival Hall in 1988.

The expansion and sombre realisation of the C minor Quartet throws the work forwards, just as the Verklärte Nacht looks backwards, to the C minor Symphony, though it’s the Second Symphony that is most explicitly prefigured by the winding, ecstatic violin line from 4'20" in the second movement; and as that line subsides, so inevitably the loss of a single, pliant instrumental voice is keenly felt. In the quicker movements, the gestures may become more general as they increase in size but they take on a different character, not less intense, if anything more so, thanks to some phenomenally alert responses on the part of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta and a recording quality of comparable range and depth.