Gramophone Magazine
February 2026
Editor's Choice

Leonkoro Quartet

Berg: Lyric Suite
Schulhoff: Five Pieces for String Quartet
Webern: Five movements for String Quartet, Op. 5
Webern: Langsamer Satz, Op. posth.

The Leonkoro Quartet, founded in 2019 and winner of multiple prestigious awards in 2022 – nine prizes at the Wigmore Hall International Competition, including first prize, BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists, Jürgen Ponto Foundation Music Prize, first prize at the Bordeaux Competition – joins Alpha Classics for several recordings. First stop: Vienna and its influence on the musical landscape of the early 20th century. Berg completed his Suite lyrique on 5 October 1926: combining theatricality and rigorous architecture, free atonality and dodecaphonism, this suite expresses the composer's passionate love for Hanna Fuchs at that time. Erwin Schulhoff, born in Prague in 1894 and died in a prison camp in Bavaria in 1942, was discovered by Dvořák and studied in Vienna from the age of 12; he dedicated his Five Pieces to Darius Milhaud, as he also studied in Paris with Debussy around 1913. In his Opus 5, described by Glenn Gould as ‘sensual’ expressionism, Webern mourns the death of his mother on 7 September 1906.

"Their reading of Webern's Five Pieces here bears comparison with the finest on record...Throughout, the performance left me admiring anew the originality and concentration of Webern's score." - Gramophone Magazine, February 2026