Rebecca Hirsh and the Netherlands Radio SO (1999) go almost too neatly to the opposite extreme, bracingly unsentimental but also prosaic when the music needs heightened expressiveness.

This Naxos issue brings together clear, positive versions of three key works by Berg, with the recordings, made in the Hilversum concert hall under the Estonian conductor Eri Klas, presenting each work in close focus. Rebecca Hirsch is an outstanding young violinist who has concentrated on twentieth-century music, and here she combines clean, precise attack with natural tonal warmth. The balance is securely held between weight of emotion and fresh modernity. So it is, too, in the other two works, not just the three-movement orchestral version of the Lyric Suite, but Berg’s early exercise in Schoenbergian atonality, the Orchestral Pieces of 1914–15, where already he demonstrates his genius for the dramatic use of orchestral colour.