For the first time all the music written for the unusual combination of string quartet and voice by the three most important composers of the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg, Webern and Berg appears together on a single CD. The music is performed by one of the best young ensembles of recent years, the Quatuor Diotima, with important contributions from the distinguished singers Sandrine Piau and Marie-Nicole Lemieux.

Founded by graduates of the Paris and Lyon conservatoires, the Diotima Quartet is a favoured partner of many contemporary composers, including Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough, and Toshio Hosokawa. It regularly commissions new pieces from such composers as Emmanuel Nunes and James Dillon, but it by no means neglects the classic string quartet repertoire, paying particular attention to the late quartets of Beethoven, French music, and the music of the early 20th century.

Only the first of the three works recorded here, Schoenberg’s Quartet op.10, has been regularly published since 1912. The second, a Bagatelle by Webern for string quartet with voice, was abandoned by its composer and remained unpublished. It was premiered only twenty years after his death. Berg’s Lyric Suite was published in 1927 in the form of a purely instrumental suite for string quartet. Its initial conception however contains a ‘private’ encrypted version, the existence of which was revealed only in 1977. This arrangement includes a soprano voice doubling the principal line of the last movement set to the words of a poem from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, ‘De Profundis Clamavi’, translated by Stefan George.