Bartók - The String Quartets

The Guardian 100

Végh Quartet
(Praga Digitals) (2 CDs)

The autobiographical story of Bartók’s six string quartets is as powerful as that of Beethoven’s quartets: a lifelong absorption in the form, which produced utterly compelling and completely distinctive pieces. From the meditative First of 1909, through the rhapsodic Second of 1918 and the acerbic Third of 1929, to the elegiac Sixth of 1939, these works reinvent the string quartet form. They have surely never found more idiomatic interpreters than the Végh Quartet, recorded in 1954, with a profound understanding of the idiom, finding the earthy folk roots in so much of this music, bringing it to life with a touch of old-fashioned portamento and restrained vibrato; supremely eloquent.