Thomas Christian’s ensemble is well placed to broaden and deepen our understanding of an overlooked Viennese contemporary of Schoenberg. I have enjoyed their previous, no less well-engineered CPO albums of late Romantic quartets by Wilhelm Kienzl, Vasily Mokranjac and – slightly better known to the world at large – Joseph Marx. They have this busy, bitonal, periodically inconsequential idiom – a Modern Romantic, as Michael Haas encapsulates Weigl in his excellent booklet essay – at their fingertips.

Both quartets here date from Weigl’s post-Anschluss exile in the US. The Seventh opens with a melody of timid yearning, banished all too soon by a Scherzo full of spiky counterpoint from which a rustic tune struggles vainly to free itself. A long Adagio, beautifully sustained by Christian and his colleagues, only deepens the mood of an uneasy idyll. There’s no faulting the conviction of the music, or the performance, but his teacher Zemlinsky, Hans Gál and others harvested much more from the same soil.

Weigl died in 1949, just a couple of months after completing his Eighth and final quartet, which had to wait until 1973 for a first performance (and until now for a first recording). More subtly integrated within a Haydnesque structure, all the more disturbing in its effect, the music’s polish and profound resignation remind me of Stefan Zweig’s late writing, shot through with a sense of what Adorno may have meant when, in the year of Weigl’s death, he wrote that ‘after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’.

The Eighth begins in medias res, like several late Schoenberg pieces, and only gradually pulls back to introduce the movement’s thematic characters. The Thomas Christian Ensemble may not call upon deep resources of tonal weight or timbre but I like their unanimity of phrasing and feeling, the gentle pacing of the Andante, placed second, and its accumulating tension. A slow introduction to the finale brings the argument to a head, torn between regret and resolution, and it’s hard to ignore in the main Allegro a painful awareness of a world lost for ever. The album makes essential listening for students of Entartete Kunst, but the Eighth in particular deserves a wider audience.