“Meine Musik ist gar nicht modern: sie ist nur schlecht gespielt.” So protested Schoenberg after a hostile and unsatisfactory performance of the Kammersymphonie, Op.9; and while few audiences, even today, let alone the contemporary audience of Vienna, 1913, would be entirely ready to agree that this music was “not at all modern”, we can readily concede that it almost certainly was vilely played: it almost invariably is.