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Disc V begins with Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Major, op. 18, no. 1, the first of what would be the quartet medium’s seminal cycle of sixteen and a harbinger of the young Beethoven’s powerful voice. Two similarly powerful musical documents, evocative of a wholly different world from nineteenth-century Vienna, follow: Erwin Schulhoff’s devastating String Sextet, composed in the wake of the First World War, and Bartók’s spirited Divertimento for Strings, composed as a means of profound catharsis with Europe on the brink of World War II.