Beethoven, Bartók and Hindemith performed by quartets in the Canadian competition.

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 ...

What It Means to Write a Quartet After Beethoven There is something about a string quartet that resembles human conversation.

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 ...

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 ...