All three works of this album are from the neoclassicistic period with the early Serenade by Krenek being a world-premiere recording.

The century was only twenty-one years old, and so was Ernst Krenek, when his Serenade, op.4, was premiered on 31 July 1921 at the newly launched "Donaueschingen Chamber Music Performances for the advancement of contemporary music." The event soon came to be known as Donaueschingen Festival, now one of the oldest specialised music festivals worldwide: Krenek's music has occasionally been heard there since then - albeit as a series of utterly contrasting works one would hardly ascribe to the same composer.

Such variety comes from Krenek's chameleon-like capacity of metamorphosis, of which he was well aware. He accepted that he came off "badly compared with the great masters of the past, whose work presents itself to us as a well-rounded, logically organized unit." We can already sense something of Krenek's bewildering stylistic diversity in his 1919 Serenade. At first sight, it seems to cling stubbornly to the style of Krenek's teacher, Franz Schreker, and to Viennese Late Romanticism. It contains a whiff of Hugo Wolf's Italian Serenade....

Hans Gál, under threat as a Jew in Germany and, from 1938, also in his native country of Austria, found refuge in the United Kingdom - although initially only as an intern in a camp, as he would vividly describe in his book Musik behind Barbed Wire. Hans Gál's style remained rooted in the Vienna tradition of the "long" 19th century.....

Krzysztof Penderecki, on the other hand, was both a traditionalist and a trailblazer. In 1959, he entered the Polish Composer Society youth competition with three anonymous works that won 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes, thus unmistakably proving his rank as one of his country's outstanding musical talents.....Penderecki composed his Clarinet Quartet, which exists in a further version for string orchestra, entitled Sinfonietta no.2. Here we are dealing with a tranquil, subdued work that almost ventures into Schubertian confines, featuring a tender nocturnal dialogue between the clarinet and the viola as the first movement's point of departure.