The Strad Recommends: Leonkoro Quartet: Out of Vienna

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: May 2026

Description: Searing musicianship from a prize-winning quartet

Musicians: Leonkoro Quartet

Works: Berg: Lyric Suite. Schulhoff: Five Pieces for String Quartet. Webern: Five Movements op.5; Langsamer Satz

Catalogue number: ALPHA 1196 

The Leonkoro Quartet truly cuts a dash. Trained by Günther Pichler of the Alban Berg Quartet and Heime Müller of the Artemis Quartet, its credentials for exploring early 20th-century Viennese modernism are impeccable.

This brilliantly conceived programme travels from Webern’s overtly Romantic Langsamer Satz to the austere, almost barren, timbres of his op.5 from just four years later. The Leonkoro depicts this expressive yet acerbically abstract music with a pared-down vibrato that highlights and clarifies the musical argument beautifully.

The musicians’ characterisation of Schulhoff’s Five Pieces is equally persuasive, from the Viennese-inflected ‘Waltz’ of the opening to the sultry hues of the ‘Tango milonga’. The electrically charged rhythmic drive of the ‘Alla tarantella’ is both exciting and furiously breathless.

In Berg’s Lyric Suite the Leonkoro is also utterly compelling, evoking a burnished expressive Romanticism, yet at the same time depicting anguished internal dialogues between various instruments with laudable cogency. This modern Expressionist language is so well-worn in our musical landscape, but here it sounds fresh and spontaneous.

The players are also alert to the opera of emotions within the suite – bringing that vital sense of theatre that colours the raging intensity of this composer’s music, while also bringing alive its sense of despair.

JOANNE TALBOT