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The Belcea Quartet's Brahms project threads his three quartets into a chain that links the classical era to the turbulent early years of the 20th century and the birth of modernism. Brahms' and Schubert's quartets are linked by their expansive slow movement arioso melodies - songs without words - and also the Hungarian high spirits of their concluding gypsy rondos. Webern seems to condense these long- breathed discourses into tiny cryptic utterances in a work of tremulous beauty, hushed and almost impossibly brief, yet heaving with expression - his music was described as 'a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a breath' by his teacher Schoenberg.