There are occasional moments in Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1 when the gloom lifts, when the densely woven musical lines pause momentarily for a spot of pure, consonant sunniness. In the string ...

One of the best ways to get to know a composer’s works is to hear them in sequence. That’s what the Penderecki String Quartet is enabling us to do with a survey of Bela Bartok’s six string quartets at ...

The repertoire for string quartet was rich before Bela Bartok took up the genre in the first decade of the 20th century. But the Hungarian composer stretched tradition in every direction, creating six ...

Béla Bartók’s six string quartets are nearly universally regarded as a summit of 20th-century chamber music. Their prestige can spill over to those ensembles that play these challenging works ...

The Takács Quartet traveled to the Savannah Music Festival to play Bela Bartók's knotty, challenging String Quartet No. 4. But how did they warm up the crowd? With a slice of insistent, lyrical ...

The autobiographical story of Bartók’s six string quartets is as powerful as that of Beethoven’s quartets: a lifelong absorption in the form, which produced utterly compelling and completely ...

The Takács Quartet traveled to the Savannah Music Festival to play Bela Bartók's knotty, challenging String Quartet No. 4. But how did they warm up the crowd? With a slice of insistent, lyrical ...

The first American performance of Bartok’s six string quartets as a cycle took place in 1948, less than three years after the composer’s death. Serge Koussevitzky, who had commissioned Bartok’s ...

Unlock access to every one of the hundreds of articles published daily on BroadwayWorld by logging in with one click. Tonight, January 18, Takács Quartet presents quartets numbers 1, 3, and 5, ...

In the universe of chamber music, the six string quartets of Bela Bartok seem to occupy their own planet, one with a gravitational pull perhaps more akin to a white dwarf. One might hear these works ...

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Bartók’s six string quartets are arguably the most important contribution to the medium after Beethoven, and they plot his evolution as a composer more completely than any other group of his works. Of ...