Congratulations! The Leonkoro Quartet, founded in Berlin in 2019, are the winners of the prestigious Wigmore International String Quartet Competition - the latest of many awards in the ensemble's young history. Are such successes the “fruit of a long and arduous labour”? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart certainly thought so when he responded to his friend Haydn's six “Russian” or “Maiden” quartets, which had deeply moved and impressed him, with his own half-dozen string quartets. On New Year's Eve 1782 he completed the first work in this set, his String Quartet in G major KV 387, the “frutto di una lunga, e laboriosa fatica”, as he was to record in the dedication to Haydn. Robert Schumann, too, was diligent and studied the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and especially Beethoven, as well as those of the later dedicatee Felix Mendelssohn, before he put his three String Quartets Opus 41 to paper within a few weeks in his chamber music year of 1842. His brief quotation of Johann Sebastian Bach in the A major quartet Op. 41/3 completes the rollcall of illustrious predecessors.