For some listeners, the music of the Second Viennese School is still a stumbling block, due to the complexity of techniques and the intense expressionism found in the innovative works of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. However, this 2015 release by the Belcea Quartet is notable for the relative accessibility of its program, which reflects the profound emotional impulses at the heart of the music, perhaps most apparent in Schoenberg's passionate string sextet, Verklärte Nacht (1899), and Webern's poignant Langsamer Satz for string quartet (1905).

The conceit that informs this disc is that Bach and Webern's meditations of life, death, and eternity are essentially complementary, that Bach's Lutheran faith and Baroque aesthetic and Webern's Catholic faith and Modernist aesthetic speak of a shared belief in the luminous and the numinous. Indeed, so pervasive is the conceit that complementary performances of Webern's orchestration of Bach's Ricercata in six voices from The Musical Offering opens and closes the disc. And so successful is the conceit that this otherwise tired trick is incredibly effective.

This is a live recording, made at a pair of concerts in May, and ‘live’ is undoubtedly the word for it. All the performances have an improvisatory quality, interpretative decisions seemingly made before your very ears. At the beginning of the Prokofiev it is as though Mutter and Orkis, realising that the audience in the Beethovensaal are already uncommonly silent and attentive, had decided after a quick glance at each other to begin the Sonata almost confidingly, with quiet tenderness and muted colour.

This is possibly this most beautifull CD ever recorded by the Kronos Quartet. Who said that Berg or Webern were writing obscur or difficult music? Actually i did, but certainly not when listening to this fabulous breathtaking, harmonius and moving interpretation.

Mitsuko Uchida has been a committed exponent of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto for over a decade now. It is a work which remains controversial in its adaptation of the serial method to an almost Brahmsian harmonic palette, wedded to a formal approach that takes up the integrated design, and textural richness, of Schoenberg's pre-atonal works. Certainly in terms of the balance between soloist and orchestra, this recording clarifies the often capricious interplay to a degree previously unheard on disc (and most likely in the concert hall too).Interpretatively, it combines Pollini's dynamism, without the hectoring touch that creeps into the Adagio's climactic passages, and Brendel's lucidity, avoiding the deadpan feeling that pervades his final Giocoso.

Webern's "Symphony" (op. 21) is like light passing through a slowly revolving prism, revealing irridescent hues you've never seen before. Following his "Passacaglia" (op. 1), which clarifies but doesn't break with the Romanticism of Brahms, Webern composed four masterful orchestral miniatures. "6 Pieces" (op. 6) and "5 Pieces" (op. 10) are incredibly brief, in the atonal style pioneered by Webern's teacher Schoenberg. They met with quite different fates – the "6 Pieces" provoked a "Le Sacre"-style riot at its Vienna premiere in 1913, and Webern fled into hiding. The "5 Pieces" wasn't publicly performed until 1924, at a festival in Zurich, 10 years after it was written. It was widely acclaimed, establishing Webern's international reputation.

This is a taut, dense Mahler 6, missing all the angst that one finds in the recordings of Bernstein or Tennstedt. But this "tragic" symphony is much less frantic than his others, and Dohnanyi's interpretation, so similar to Szell's with the Cleveland Orchestra, is the way I feel the symphony ought to be played. This ranks in my top three or four Mahler 6, along with Abbado Berlin, Karajan, and Szell.

The surprising thing about these three discs is that the performances get better the further we depart from the shores of Romanticism and tonality. Not what you'd expect from von K and the Berliners. Pelleas benefits from wonderfully lush orchestral playing from the Berlin Philharmonic, but it feels more like very colourful scene painting rather than real drama. To get to the Romantic heart of this piece, try Barbirolli: for its expressionist, forward looking (via Verklarte Nacht to Erwartung) side, go to Boulez.

One might be forgiven for initially thinking that this recital featuring works for cello and piano by Franz Schubert, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg was, well, a stunt. After all, aside from their birth in the city of Vienna, what do the three composers have in common? Schubert was the quintessential master of lyrical Austro-German romanticism, while Webern and Berg were two of the three most reviled masters of atonal Austro-German expressionism – the third, of course, was Arnold Schoenberg – and one might think they'd be an impossible coupling.