Historical performance pioneer, Trevor Pinnock, conducts the Royal Academy of Music Ensemble in revealing chamber arrangements of Mahler’s most frequently performed symphony and Debussy’s Prelude a l'apres midi d'un faune, on its debut recording for Linn.

Arranged for Schoenberg’s 1918 Society for Private Musical Performances, these reductions were designed to highlight the fresh perspective a stripped-back orchestration could offer the listener.

With this recording, Trevor and the Academy launch a series of performances and recordings which are retrospectively reigniting Schoenberg’s vision of performing chamber reductions of symphonic repertoire, including newly commissioned arrangements for this series.

Erwin Stein’s visionary transformation of Mahler’s neo-classicist symphony is for fifteen players and soprano (Sonia Grane). A Mahler symphony of more modest proportions, it lends itself perfectly to a chamber arrangement.

Benno Sachs’ re-orchestration of Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune retains many of the sounds of Debussy’s original, using the span of the piano to fill out gaps in the texture, and the harmonium to sustain missing parts in the winds, additions which add much interest and afford a new coherence and sensuality to the melodic line.

Trevor Pinnock is known worldwide as a harpsichordist and conductor who pioneered performance on historical instruments with his own orchestra, The English Concert.

In the 2012/13 season, Pinnock conducts the Kioi Sinfonietta, Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts Orchestra, Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg (where he is Principal Guest Conductor), Rotterdam Philharmonic, Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig, and tours with the Kammerorchester Basel and Maria João Pires.

In opera he conducts Mozart's Don Giovanni with Houston Opera and Haydn's La Vera Constanza with the Royal Academy of Music, London.

Pinnock gives solo recitals throughout the UK and trio recitals in the UK and Europe with Jonathan Manson and Matthew Truscott.

The recording is produced by Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, whose producing career has won him several awards including Diapasons d’Ors, eight Gramophone Awards and many further nominations.