Schreker's "Chamber Symphony" (1916-17), with Welser-Most/CAS on EMI is
another great early 20th-Century find.  (Also try the Whitman Songs, on
KOCH; and "Der Geburtstag der Infantin," on London.)

Scored for eleven strings, harp, celesta, harmonium, piano, and percussion;
the Symphony's soundscape is similar to that of his opera, Die
Gezeichneten: very ethereal, with wisps of nostaligic melody floating above
bitonal harp/piano arpeggiation and shimmering strings.  Schreker lends a
wonderful sense of rhythm to the allegro passages, and, no matter what the
size of his forces, dispatches such passages with an orchestral buoyancy
and lightness one typically associates only with the French.

If Schoenberg's concern was to make *original* ideas sound
*palatable* by retaining the forms of his predecessors, ("They call us
modernists"--Schoenberg to Schreker), it occurs to me that Schreker's
concern was to make *palatable* ideas sound *original* by eschewing form
and embracing spontaneity.  By doing so, Schreker, for better or for worse,
helped set the stage for the "sound for its own sake" philosophies of
composers from Varese to Ligeti.

IMHO, what separates Schreker from the other neglected masters, (such as
those on London's Entartete series), is his unerring sense of proportion,
the eveness of quality within his works, and his original voice.

If you were put off by the busy libretto and the seeming orchestral
excesses of Gezeichneten, I highly recommend the Chamber Symphony as a
stunning, yet small-scale example of Schreker's orchestral and
compositional mastery.

The recording is excellent and includes Mahler's orchestration of
Schubert's "Death and the Maiden."  The cover art is gorgeous--a
semi-transparent, airbrushed black and white of, what I believe is to be,
the apparition of a dead maiden.   (I apologize ahead of time for any
fellow Americans who might protest that ghosts on CD covers, esp. women
ghosts, should cover their nakedness and dress appropriately.)

John Smyth