The Prazák Quartet’s prowess in the music of, and around, the Second Viennese School has already been demonstrated. This new disc ties up Schoenbergian loose ends as well as including Mahler’s sole surviving contribution to the chamber medium. His Piano Quartet movement (1876) is brooding and dark-hued; the lead-back to the main theme’s reprise is especially effective.

Schoenberg’s String Quartet in D (1897) can be interpreted either as the completion of his apprenticeship or as the harbinger of new developments. The Prazák play safe by keeping the work within the technical and temperamental limits of Brahms and Dvovák. The opening movement lacks its exposition repeat and the third movement loses some of the variations that the Arditti’s rightly include, but this is still a likeable reading – at its best in the pensive melancholy of the Intermezzo and vigour of the Finale.

In its synthesis of form and expression, the String Trio (1946) is Schoenberg’s crowning achievement. The Prazák members maintain a firm grip in the visceral ‘Part One’, and their unanimity of ensemble solves most of the textural pitfalls in which the two episodes abound. A touch more dynamism would not have gone amiss, not least the heightened reprise going into ‘Part Three’, but this remains a lucid way into a troubled masterpiece. Vlastimil Holek equally has the measure of the Phantasy (1949), projecting both its thorny rhetoric and distilled lyricism with a sure awareness of overall cohesion.

The recorded balance is immediate but sympathetic, with that between piano and strings exemplary in both respects. The notes are informative if at times prolix, and slightly awkwardly translated (‘post-Lisztian “magic rondo”’ indeed!). Altogether a worthwhile collection of – and no mean entrée into – the chronological limits of Viennese modernism.