It's something of a challenge to recast Berg's Op. 1 Piano Sonata as a work for string sextet. …this arrangement, made by the Artemis Quartet's violinist Heime Müller, works wonderfully well. …their performance of the Sextet from Strauss's Capriccio sounds equally sumptuous as does their atmospheric and highly charged account of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht.

…in Verklärte Nacht… the Artemis Quartet are joined by two members of the Alban Berg Quartet: the viola player Thomas Kakuska has since died, and the disc is dedicated to him. It's a memorable performance, beginning icily but generating a fiery intensity as the work's successive episodes unfold. A similar urgency and eloquence are found in the sextet which Strauss wrote as the Prelude to his last opera, Capriccio. Heime Müller's sextet arrangement of Berg's Piano Sonata is also refreshing in its resourceful transformation of this hyper-romantic music from one homogeneous medium to another.