The Society for Private Musical Performances, which Schoenberg and his acolytes founded in Vienna in 1919, may have survived for only three years, but in that time it presented 117 concerts, containing a total of 154 works, ranging across the spectrum of new music in the first decades of the 20th century. Many of them were played in chamber arrangements made specially for the society by its members. Schoenberg himself was responsible for some of them, and in 1921 he began to make an arrangement of Das Lied von der Erde, but stopped work halfway through the first movement. It was only in the 1980s that the German composer Rainer Riehn continued it, using the same ensemble of 14 players that Schoenberg had established.
It’s no substitute for the original, but it is still a remarkably plausible piece of work, using piano and harmonium to bulk out the textures and imaginative wind doublings to evoke the tone colours of the original. Unfortunately, a rather odd boxy acoustic and recording take the edge of this performance by the Linos Ensemble, though the soloists – mezzo Ivonne Fuchs and tenor Markus Schäfer are very fine, even though like every tenor before him Schäfer sometimes struggles with the tessitura of his vocal lines.
