Viennese composer Egon Wellesz was very much a product of his times. Mahler's conducting was an early influence, while Schoenberg and von Hofmannsthal were influential associates.
Once Hitler's hordes had conquered Europe he landed in Oxford where he became a Reader in Byzantine music. For a while the trauma of exile blocked Wellesz's creative impulse but he recovered well, and by the time of his death in 1972 had clocked up an impressively varied output. The quartets cover the length and breadth of Wellesz's career, the earliest here, the Third (1918), reflecting key Romantic and 'Impressionist' influences, the turbulent second movement starting out in the manner of Chausson, the rest more indebted perhaps to Debussy and early Schoenberg.
There's also, in the fugal passages of the finale, a hint of Max Reger's playful counterpoint.
The curve of Wellesz's development reflects a trend similar to many of his contemporaries: early romanticism gives way, in the 1920s and beyond, to confrontational modernism eventually leading to a cooler, post-classical style. The Fourth Quartet (1922) is terse, aphoristic and tautly argued, each of its five movements shorter in length than you might expect, its style intense and inscrutable. Calum MacDonald's invaluable note suggests an audible prophecy of Berg's Lyric Suite and there some telling similarities to Bartók too.
The Sixth Quartet (1947) opens like a homage to Beethoven's Coriolan Overture and the classical axis remains in place more or less throughout, especially in the middle movements. Performance- wise one could hardly ask for more in the way of dedication or perception.