The three works for string quartet by Anton Webern that were published in his lifetime – the Five Movements Op 5, Six Bagatelles Op 9, and the Op 28 String Quartet – add up to less than 25 minutes’ music, short measure for a recording. Finding a complement for these elusive, drastically compressed pieces is tricky – alongside them, the string quartets by his teacher Schoenberg, for instance, seem positively indulgent and overblown. So the Richter Ensemble has opted for a work that is equally spare and even more enigmatic, Bach’s The Art of Fugue.
