What I imagine happened here was that a live performance of the Lyric Symphony in Prague was so well received that it seemed a good idea to issue it on CD. As a further good idea the Third Quartet was suggested as a coupling (it was written immediately after the symphony; the two works absorbingly reflect each other) and, best idea of all, the Kocian Quartet were invited into the studio to record it. The sum of all these good ideas, alas, is a very fine performance of the quartet with only an adequate one of the symphony as a makeweight.
The Kocian Quartet are fully alive to the strangeness and audacity of Zemlinsky’s Third Quartet, its almost Webern-like economy, its way of taking perfectly conventional forms (sonata, variation, song and rondo respectively) and making them sound queerly phantasmagoric. It is a Janus-faced piece, seemingly inhabiting the world of Mahler but also seeing the future quite clearly, and these players have a very good ear for that, as well as an appreciation of what pure and intimate chamber music it is. I should be grateful for this recording of the Lyric Symphony if there were not a very much better one already available (under Riccardo Chailly). Valek obviously loves the work and has prepared it well, but either the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra lack the last degree of opulence and finesse that this music needs or the constricted recording gives that impression. Both soloists are decent but neither summons up much rapture or poetry, nor much sensitivity to the words. You will, however, hear real East European horn sound (the composer, whose family name was originally spelled Zemlinszky and who spent 16 years in Prague, might have enjoyed it). The not-quite-balanced recording also enables you to hear a sound that composers have often vainly demanded, a celeste playing ff (last page of the Lyric Symphony, and a nasty shock). A pity: the coupling really was a good idea.'