More than one piece of headily romantic music was inspired by Richard Dehmel’s 1896 poem Verklärte Nacht, or Transfigured Night. The most familiar remains Schoenberg’s string masterpiece, first conceived as a sextet in 1899, reworked for string orchestra nearly two decades later and rarely very far from its composer’s mind for the rest of his life. This, in its orchestral version, is the pivotal piece on this recording, and it finds Edward Gardner drawing playing of sumptuous intensity but also ravishing delicacy from the strings of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, recorded in the studio days before the first lockdown.
But it’s the rest of the repertoire that ....
