Given the wrong sort of performance, Verklarte Nacht can drag on interminably – but not here. Iona Brown’s reading with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra lends every instrumental exchange the immediacy of live theatre: her lovers are voluble, unstinting and spontaneously communicative. There is colour in every bar: Schoenberg’s ceaseless shifts in tone and tempo seem freshly credible, and the sum effect is extraordinarily compelling. The up-front recording (1994) further compounds a sense of urgency; only the closing pages seem a trifle uncomfortable with such close scrutiny.
Effective sampling-points are legion, but try from, say, 21'59'' (track 1) and Brown’s animated approach becomes palpable. Rivals, however, are plentiful. Among older alternatives (of the full-string version), Mitropoulos and the Vienna Philharmonic are the most involving, Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic the most tonally alluring; but Brown runs them both close, and her young Norwegian players are with her virtually every bar of the way. No digital rival is quite as good.
Brown’s leadership of the NCO goes back to 1981, which is why the orchestra has such a strong interpretative identity. The Schubert-Mahler offers further confirmation of a genuine artistic alliance and rather upstages Chandos’s earlier recording of the piece under Yuri Turovsky. Note, for example, the firmly drawn bass-line 9'31'' into the allegro, just prior to the ghostly return of the opening idea; or the Scherzo’s keenly accented canter; or the Erlkonig-style sense of terror that dominates most of the finale. Mahler’s bolstered textures work least well in the second movement (where dramatic gesture plays a subsidiary role), something that even Brown’s advocacy doesn’t quite compensate for; but the rest is shot through with genuine passion and vitality. A memorable disc.'