condition (record/cover): NM / NM Insert included. | Three works spanning Arnold Schoenberg's entire creative trajectory, performed by the ensemble Pierre Boulez built specifically to play this music. The Lied der Waldtaube from Gurrelieder reaches back to the late-Romantic Schoenberg of 1900, here in the composer's own 1922 arrangement for chamber orchestra - the vast orchestral canvas of the original compressed into seventeen instruments, every harmonic detail suddenly exposed. The Serenade Op. 24 (1920-23) is the pivotal transitional work: seven movements for clarinet, bass clarinet, mandolin, guitar, violin, viola, cello and bass voice, with a twelve-tone row appearing for the first time in the fourth movement setting of Petrarch's Sonnet 217. And the Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte Op. 41 (1942) is wartime American Schoenberg at his most caustic - Byron's anti-tyranny poem set for narrator, piano and string quartet, the twelve-tone method bent toward tonal allusion in a work that pointedly ends on an E-flat major triad.

Jessye Norman sings the Waldtaube, and her voice here - dark-grained, immense, controlled with absolute precision - transforms the Wood Dove's lament into something almost unbearably present. This is not a soprano scaling down for chamber forces: it is a voice that fills the reduced ensemble the way it would fill an opera house, but from within, with the intimacy of seventeen players around her. John Shirley-Quirk takes the bass-baritone part in the Serenade and the Ode, with David Wilson-Johnson as narrator in the Byron setting. The Ensemble Intercontemporain, founded by Boulez in 1976 and based at IRCAM, plays throughout - the conductor's own instrument, drilled to a transparency and rhythmic precision that makes even the most complex textures legible.

This LP belongs to Boulez's monumental Schoenberg recording project for CBS, which alongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra sessions constitutes the most comprehensive and analytically penetrating survey of Schoenberg's output ever committed to disc. Where earlier interpreters - including Schoenberg's own circle - tended to emphasize either the expressive or the structural dimension, Boulez insists on both simultaneously: every phrase shaped, every voice audible, the emotional content emerging from the clarity rather than obscuring it. The programming here is itself an argument - three moments where Schoenberg reinvented his relationship to tradition, heard in sequence, revealing the underlying continuity that connects the young post-Wagnerian to the American dodecaphonist.

LP. CBS Masterworks, 1982.