Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and String Quartet No 1 are both single-movement symphonic structures, rich in polyphonic detail and ending with consolatory major-key codas. The sextet is explicitly programmatic; and, although Schoenberg preferred not to acknowledge it, the quartet is no less pictorial, of psychological states and fraught human relationships that – the music seems to suggest – find fulfilment (if only in fantasy) in sweetness and light. For compositions conceived in the cultural hothouse that was Vienna between 1899 and 1905, these recordings, made in New York in 2012, set aside any quest for Romantic refinements. The urgency is raw and immediate, occasionally hard-driven in an acoustic suggesting confined spaces and close interactions; the result is undeniably exciting.

I don’t recall having these works on the same disc before; together they reinforce the extraordinary confidence and speed with which Schoenberg had advanced from his ultra-conventional beginnings just a few years before. Verklärte Nacht may still overdo the sequential repetitions at times but the quartet is never more striking than when it teeters on the edge of an atonal abyss in which well-balanced phraseology and clear-cut thematic shaping are equally at risk. With their experience of the later quartets to call on, Fred Sherry and his team relish the forward-looking qualities even more than the lingering over what would soon be impossible. There was really no need to include the three minutes of eye-music that comprises the four canons: the two main items provide ample value for money.