Aron Quartet: Wellesz

The Strad Issue: November 2025

Description: Eloquent readings serve a Schoenberg pupil well

Musicians: Aron Quartet

Works: Wellesz: String Quartets nos.2, 5 and 7

Catalogue number: CPO 555 617-2

Vienna-born Egon Wellesz was one of Schoenberg’s first pupils (though he quickly moved on to pursue his own, more individual ideas), and lived and taught in Oxford after the Nazi annexation of Austria until his death in 1974.

His music has never achieved the same fame (or notoriety) as that of his fellow Schoenberg students Berg and Webern, and this disc of three of his ten string quartets offers compelling insights into his wide-ranging output, even if the Viennese Aron Quartet’s performances might do a little more to stress the music’s drama.

The players bring a supple shaping to the brooding opening movement of the substantial Second Quartet, completed in 1916, though their Brahmsian second movement feels too aristocratic for the music’s powerful rhythms, and their third-movement scherzo is rather heavy footed.

First violinist Ludwig Müller gives an eloquent, intense solo introduction to the second movement of the Seventh Quartet (1948), and the four players bring a great deal of clarity and expressive detail to the piece’s grand and distinctly Beethovenian closing fugue, its counterpoint growing ever more complex.

The 1943 Fifth Quartet is the disc’s standout piece, a work of quiet mourning written after a five-year silence following Wellesz’s relocation to Britain, and played with sensitivity and utter conviction. Recorded sound is close, detailed and warm.

DAVID KETTLE