Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester/Pierre Boulez477 9347 ****

Arnold Schoenberg met Richard Strauss when he was keeping the wolf from the door by working as a music copyist on Strauss's cantata, Taillefer. The older composer responded encouragingly to Schoenberg's own huge cantata, Gurrelieder, and also gave him a copy of Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Melisande, on which Schoenberg (unaware of Debussy's opera) wrote a 40-minute, expressionist symphonic poem. The marriage of the lucid musical mind of Pierre Boulez and the ardency of the young players of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester makes for a persuasive presentation of the dark, congealing, late- romantic massiveness of Schoenberg's ambitious score. The longing of the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is also well caught. The recordings were made at a concert in Tokyo in 2003. url.ie/57as