Takacs Quartet play all-Bartok for Carnegie Hall Live

Bartok has been a staple of the Takacs Quartet's repertory for decades, with the group's affinity for his music evidenced in each breathtaking performance.

Tune in Saturday, January 18 at 7 p.m. CST for the Takacs Quartet on Carnegie Hall Live.

Having been hailed for uniquely capturing all of the textural elements of the composer's string quartets, "from the explosively energetic to the grimly sardonic, incorporated into a single, magnificent musical span" (The Guardian), the revered quartet embarks on a cycle of these works with this program of odd numbered quartets from the early, middle, and late periods of Bartok's canon.

Program:

Bartok: String Quartet No. 1
Bartok: String Quartet No. 3
Bartok: String Quartet No. 5

At a Glance

Like Beethoven and Shostakovich, Bartok repeatedly turned to the string quartet as a vehicle for expressing his deepest and most personal musical thoughts. The Hungarian composer's unrequited love for violinist Stefi Geyer helped inspire the first of his six quartets--one of several works that feature her four-note musical "signature." Quartet No. 3--composed in the summer of 1927 and first performed in Philadelphia 18 months later--was influenced by the imaginatively colored sound world of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite. What Theodor Adorno called the quartet's "iron concentration" and "wholly original tectonics" are reflected in its highly compressed single-movement form. Bartok's Fifth Quartet is also associated with the United States: Commissioned by the American arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, it was premiered in Washington, DC, in 1935. Laid out in five movements, three predominantly fast and two slow, the work is notable for its rhythmic verve, richly imaginative tonal effects, and archlike construction.