Haydn: String Quartets Op 20 Nos 2, 5 & 6: Lindsay Quartet (ASV)

This disc completes the Lindsays's recording of Haydn's first set of great quartets, nicknamed the Sun after an early title-page vignette. The set is famous for the richness of counterpoint Haydn here introduced to the string quartet, and the Lindsays have opted to bring all three quartets with fugal finales together on single disc. In the 10 or 12 years he'd been composing quartets, Haydn had developed the medium to an astonishing degree. "Divertimento" was the description on the title page, but the manner is weighty, often grave, and the musical argument is substantial and rewardingly diverse in invention. The Lindsays's performances are subtly plain-spoken, as if the players feel Haydn's work too precious to be imposed upon with personal attitudes of their own.

Michael Dervan

Piano music by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern: Peter Hill (Naxos)

The major solo piano music of the Second Viennese School covers the period from 1908 to 1936. At one end, Berg's searching Op. 1 was written in the same year as the Expressionist pieces of Schoenberg's Op. 11. At the other, Webern's Op. 27 Variations stand as a pure monument to the 12-tone technique his teacher, Schoenberg, had unveiled in the 1920s. Schoenberg's own works chart his creative journey towards and through his new compositional method, the ever-present traditionalist in his make-up exhibiting the fruits of his new discovery in a baroque-style suite. Hill presents everything with the understanding born of familiarity and experience. He would never have provoked Schoenberg to say "My music is not modern, it is merely badly played".

Michael Dervan