Yet another item in the Duo 20th Century Classics series presenting a key work in modern music, the Gurrelieder by Arnold Schoenberg.

It was in March 1900 that Arnold Schoenberg started setting a German translation of Jens Peter Jacobsen's Gurrelieder as a song cycle for voice and piano for entry in a competition. He soon grasped, however, that this text had much greater potentialities and working very quickly, as he always did, by the following March he had composed a cantata of almost unprecedented dimensions.

The music, in three parts with an extended coda, is a series of tableaux of great power. Essentially the sound world is that of Wagner, and the score demonstrates Arnold Schoenberg's complete mastery of Wagnerian style.

Although very short in comparison with the Gurrelieder, the Chamber Symphony No. 1, written in 1906, is a work of impressive weight and Arnold Schoenberg himself regarded it as the climax of his first stylistic period.

Arnold Schoenberg finished his Second Chamber Symphony in 1939; at the time he was deeply involved in 12-tone writing. The original concept of this work, however, originated from his late romantic period in the first decade of the century and he tried to finalize the work as he originally intended.

This recording of the Gurrelieder features Jessye Norman in the cast. As an additional bonus there are the recordings of the two Chamber Symphonies, which have never been released on CD before!