Alban Berg’s String Quartet can be considered to be one of the founding works of the Second Viennese School. Already composed in 1910 and first published in 1920, it was the last composition the 25-year-old wrote under the tutelage of Arnold Schoenberg, who admired “the fullness and unconstraint of his musical language, the strength and sureness of its presentation, its careful working and significant originality”.

Even today the extremely complex work places the highest technical demands on...