Wellesz

Wellesz got out of Vienna in time; he was in Amsterdam when Hitler annexed Austria.

Ultimately, though, the Wellesz piece didn’t strike me as first-rate music, and once Alban Berg’s sparkling, beautiful “Lyric Suite” got underway, I was sure of it.

On Thursday night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, Fleming teamed up with the Emerson String Quartet to reprise pieces by Austrian composers Alban Berg and Egon Wellesz they recently recorded for Decca.

A musicologist and composition student of Arnold Schoenberg, Wellesz composed his “Five Sonnets” for soprano and string quartet in 1934, before the Nazi annexation of Austria forced him to flee to England.

While she could get away with doing only chestnuts like “O mio babbino caro,” with the quartet she visits a lightly traveled corner of the repertory: Berg’s “Lyric Suite,” Eric Zeisl’s songs and, most intriguingly, Egon Wellesz’s richly fretful settings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets, translated by Rilke.