"Editor's choice: Having excelled over the decades with their interpretations of 18th- and 19th-century, they have now joined forces with Barbara Hannigan for a programme including three 10th-century works, placing a pair of expressionistic string quartets alongside two rarely heard vocal pieces ... No singer in Op 10 Schoenberg can surpass Barbara Hannigan in anatomising its searing mix of primitive and spiritually aspiring states of mind, matched to the hilt by the Emerson's close-knit delineation of the massed shards of motivic elements the music throws out ... The Emersons come to the Schoenberg as if it were new, hot from the press, and in doing so they recreate the sense of inordinate extravagance that made early audiences so uneasy"

"After nearly five decades, the Emerson Quartet are calling it quits and they haven't gone out with crowd pleasers like Beethoven or Mozart. In some ways this is typical of them. They have always retained an enthusiasm for the music of the Second Viennese School ... This is music that thrives on being given the glam treatment once in a while ... Hannigan is her usual peerless self if singing of such rare distinction can ever be seen as usual ... Throughout their playing of both this and the Berg is warm blooded ... All that remains is to wish the Emerson Quartet a long, healthy and fruitful retirement and to say, in the spirit of this recording's title, Bon voyage!"

"Recording of the week: Each of these works is in some sense challenging; musically, psychologically, or both. But there's surely nobody better-placed than Barbara Hannigan to explore those darker musical corners, and her musical collaborators are second to none. For the Emersons, it not only looks back to their track-record of championing adventurous repertoire, but perhaps also echoes on a more personal level the bittersweetness of bidding farewell"

"Alban Berg's Op 3 Quartet, completed in 1910, two years after his teacher Schoenberg's Second ... makes a logical companion piece, and the Emersons give both works warm, lustrous performances ... Barbara Hannigan is the soprano in the Schoenberg, her elegance and cool, precise shaping of every phrase perfectly tailored to the keenly expressive vocal lines ... There's also room on the disc for a couple of beautifully rendered rarities, both unearthed by Hannigan ... But the real discovery is Chausson's Chanson Perpétuelle ... which though less than eight minutes long seems to encapsulate a whole world of tragedy with operatic intensity"

Vurdering: 9/10