When Christoph von Dohnányi spoke to Limelight earlier this year, he mentioned the challenges of performing Webern. “I love Webern’s pieces, only they are very hard to play in concert,” he said, “if people turn their programmes, if people cough, and if people come in and out, it makes it hard. Webern needs total silence – the slightest noise is disturbing to the music, very fundamentally.” The Australian String Quartet’s decision to open their Tempesta programme with Webern’s Fünf Sätze was, therefore, a bold one, but it certainly paid off.

Primed by violist Stephen King’s introduction, the audience responded with hushed awe as the quartet swept from crunching dissonances and dramatic gestures to breathy, scurrying whispers and tiny ambient noises. The drawn out chords of the second movement were spell-binding, isolated pizzicato notes falling like drops of liquid into a dark pool. The four musicians deftly flirted with the border between silence and sound, crystalline harmonics glistening over the soft susurration of audience breaths.

Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major Op. 20 No 2 was his 32nd quartet and the first to begin with an instrument other than the first violin. The...