WGBH has hosted many string quartets in its performance studio. Hear three of the best, playing music by Joseph Haydn. Two hundred years ago — May 31, 1809, to be exact — Joseph Haydn died at age 76.

Ignace Joseph Pleyel’s ‘Prussian’ Quartets were composed during the mid-1780s and published in four sets of three in 1787 with a dedication to Frederick William II of Prussia – the cello-playing king ...

In his Op.76 string quartets Haydn shows us six faces, if not more. Each one of the half-dozen quartets ventures daringly in character. We see Haydn the courtly and the rustic, the warm-hearted and ...

The String Quartet version op. 51 Hob XX/1B is the most often performed and recorded. But it is not the original and only presumably (though not certainly) a transcription of his own – as opposed to ...

The British viola player James Boyd, versatile in all repertoire, founded the London Haydn Quartet in 2001 out of a passion for Haydn’s quartet masterpieces and a desire to play them in historically ...

It is hard, after listening to this pair of fresh, lively and intensely musical recordings, to understand why the Lindsays have decided to cease their activities as a quartet this year. There are ...

Across the week Donald Macleod enjoys a masterclass in string quartet writing, from one of the great masters of the form. From his opus 0 and opus 1 of the 1750s to his unfinished opus 103 of 1803, ...

Late in life, Haydn reportedly expressed the wish that his canon of string quartets should be considered to have begun not with his very earliest works in the form, from the late 1750s, but with Op 9 ...