Volume 2 of the Naxos Robert Craft Schoenberg Collection features the Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra after Handel, a work so freely transcribed and developed that it should be counted among Schoenberg’s own compositions. Arguably one of his most high-spirited, tender and tuneful works, it is also one of the most demanding for the solo instruments of a quartet since Beethoven’s Great Fugue. For the first performance of The Book of the Hanging Gardens, a setting for mezzo-soprano and piano to texts by Stefan George (1868–1933), Schoenberg himself wrote: “I have for the first time succeeded in approaching an ideal of expression and form which has been in my mind for years”.