The music of Arnold Schoenberg featured large in Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic’s programming in the half-decade leading up to 2024. The raised profile was in anticipation of the 150th anniversary of his birth that year and the results, recorded live in concert, are now available for a wider audience on a three-disc CD set with bonus Blu-ray video disc.

There is a striking sense of conductor and orchestra on a mission here, the booklet foreword pointedly arguing that Schoenberg’s music, despite the notions of complexity and inscrutability that have accrued around it, is “by no means purely intellectual”. Instead, it goes on, “our selection reveals what Anton Webern wrote about his teacher: ‘Schoenberg’s sensibility is of searing ardour’ [and] rooted ‘entirely in the need for expression’”.

A firm assertion of that is immediately heard in a blistering account of Verklärte Nacht – coincidentally the first Schoenberg piece to be performed by the Berlin Philharmonic in 1919. Petrenko drives its expansive 1943 version to the edge of extremes, dredging its dark subterranean currents repeatedly to a...