Korossy Quartet - Bartók String Quartets/1 Presented by Liszt Academy

Béla Bartók’s string quartets stand among the true classics of 20th-century music. Though the six works were written under vastly different circumstances and display striking stylistic variety, they are widely viewed as a unified cycle. The String Quartet No. 2, composed in stages between 1915 and 1918 during the First World War. Its lyrical, deeply personal opening movement gives way to a fierce Scherzo infused with Arab and Romanian folk rhythms, before closing with a slow, resigned finale that feels like a quiet farewell. Written on the eve of World War II in 1939, the String Quartet No. 6 also ends with a slow movement. This funeral music is based on the Mesto (“sad”) theme, which frames the individual movements – the tender opening, the grotesque Marcia, and the darkly humorous Burletta – as a slow introduction. Driven by a strong inner urge, Bartók decided in 1928, barely a year after completing his still-unperformed Quartet No. 3, to compose his String Quartet No. 4. This was Bartók’s first five-movement composition in which the outer and inner pairs of movements (I and V, II and IV) are thematically interconnected. It is no coincidence that composers who were also analysts of serial music later identified this quartet as the key to understanding the Hungarian master’s oeuvre.