‘Quartet playing is the most glorious music-making there is.’ When Anton Berg, an accomplished cellist and chamber musician, shared this sentiment with a friend in 1910, he had already written works that in their technical difficulty and revolutionary language undermined nearly every premise of a cosy evening of amateur music-making. But the string quartet, at least since Beethoven, had also on occasion become a vehicle for uncompromising compositional aspirations. The works on this disc document Webern’s own path from a culture of informal social discourse to an ideology of ultimate utterance in which performance is but an incidental realisation of musical attributes.

Langsamer Satz (1905), the earliest work on this disc, is a sunny, still firmly tonal work in tripartite form with a richly varied reprise. With the Piano Quintet (1907) Webern was on the threshold of those works to which he assigned opus numbers and that form the main body of his œuvre, beginning with the Passacaglia for Orchestra, Op. 1 (1908). It is with the Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 5 (1908) however, that we first encounter Webern’s hallmark aphoristic brevity.

Webern’s last piece of chamber music was his String Quartet (1938).The work’s twelve-tone row is an ingenious compendium of mirror and symmetrical relationships and Berg regarded it as a work of culminating synthesis in which he had finally achieved a balance of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ concerns.