If you take the line that Schubert stands for things in music which most composers active since 1950 have, regrettably, abandoned, this disc is probably not for you. But the programme can also be heard as an attractively diverse attempt to explore, from a distance, the memory of music which fascinates in speaking so directly of its creator’s short yet incredibly productive life.

Hans Zender’s versions of Lieder come closest to straight arrangements, Zender’s own very distinct musical personality virtually erased. Aribert Reimann’s eight-minute transformation of a short Minuet is more typical in the way it asserts a modernist identity without losing sight of its Schubertian materials, but also without forcing the kind of confrontations between old and new that govern Berio’s Rendering, 35 minutes in which the surviving sketches for what would have been Schubert’s Tenth Symphony are mischievously juxtaposed with various commentaries whose expressive reticence quite belies their subversive effect.

Kurt Schwertsik’s Epilog zu ‘Rosamunde’ is closer to Reimann than to Berio, keeping its Schubert material in the background and adopting an eloquent contemporary idiom that makes something positive out of the evident regret with which Schwertsik regards the gulf between Schubert’s musical world and his own. As for Henze’s five-minute Erlkönig, subtitled ‘orchestral fantasy from Le fils d’air’ (a ballet completed in 1997 but first mooted more than three decades earlier) the connection between Schubert’s ballad and Henze’s densely exhilarating scherzo is primarily to do with relentless rhythmic repetition.

Rendering has already has two previous recordings, one conducted by Berio himself (RCA, 8/98), but the rest are new to disc. All are well delineated by Jonathan Nott and his Bamberg team. The Bavarian Radio recordings are adequate.