Bartok's Quartets

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 771, 30 April 1954, Page 17

Bartok's Quartets

HERE is no better way to approach the music of Béla. Bartok, and certainly no better way of understanding the processes of growth that his music underwent, than through the string quartets," wrote Halsey Stevens. Making use of techniques borrowed from here and there, as well as techniques completely new, he said, the quartets remain the personal, intense expression of one man, who, if he had written nothing else, would still be reckoned among the handful of significant composers of our ‘time. The quartet was the only form that interested Bartok throughout his life. He wrote one, which he later suppressed, when he was 18, and he was planning a new one less than a year before he died in 1945. Between these are the six quartets which, says Mr. Stevens, mark not only successive culmination. points in Bartok’s career, but also in a sense the culmination of 20th Century activity in the form. Introduced by a talk by David Farquhar, the six quartets of Bartok are to be heard during the next few weeks from 2YC. The recordings are by the Juilliard String Quartet. The first broadcast will be at 7.20 p.m. on Friday, May 7.