This recording of Erwin Stein’s strange but cute 1921 arrangement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony for a few winds, a few strings, keyboards, and percussion scores over the competition on Novalis in several respects. In the first place, it’s better played (by the virtuoso Linos Ensemble) and recorded. Second, instead of a boy soprano we have Alison Browner, who sings the finale attractively and (arguably) more idiomatically. The group’s swifter Scherzo and slightly slower Adagio also serves the music more persuasively, even on this small scale. Finally, Olaf Bär turns up for a finely sung, substantial coupling: Schoenberg’s 1920 arrangement of the Songs of a Wayfarer.
As with this same group’s recent recording of the pint-sized Bruckner Seventh, there are interesting details to be heard here, particularly in the writing for piano and harmonium (check out the symphony’s first-movement climax, just before the recapitulation), that reveal harmonic niceties that usually go unnoticed in the music’s normal context, though these arrangements never will be more than curiosities. Still, if you collect these works and care about them deeply, these arrangements may help you get to know them better, or at least differently.
