Alban Berg’s two best known orchestral works naturally provide the headlines, but it is the pieces that begin this disc that mark it out from most of its competitors. Last year the conductor Andrew Davis made orchestral versions of two early scores by Berg – his Piano Sonata Op 1, completed by 1909, while he was studying with Schoenberg, and the unfinished Passacaglia on a 12-note theme, which is the only substantial surviving fragment (four minutes long) of what was possibly going to be a symphony, conceived just before the outbreak of the first world war. Both pieces have been orchestrated and even recorded before but, as he writes in a sleeve note, Davis felt that those versions had not really evoked the Viennese sound world of Mahler, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Schreker that Berg inhabited at that time.
