Quatuor Danel

In his third string quartet, a perfect synthesis of great formal density and exuberant expressiveness, Béla Bartók (1881-1945) shows himself a worthy heir to Ludwig van Beethoven. Bartók wrote this highly concentrated work in 1927, ten years after his Second Quartet. The simple themes are developed with consummate skill. Moreover, he expanded the range of timbres in the quartet by adding marvellous glissandi and mysterious murmurings, which he was to use again in later quartets. The Turkish composer and ethnomusicologist Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907-1991) studied with Vincent d'Indy in Paris. Together with Bartók, he collected Ottoman folk music. He wrote four string quartets. This Second Quartet dates from 1957. The fusion of Western musical principles with traditional folk music is typical of his style. Together with the string quartets of Bartók, Schoenberg and Shostakovich, the seven quartets by Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) make up the solid foundation of the quartet writing of the first half of the twentieth century. Hindemith wrote his very first quartet in 1915, while studying composition at the Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main. This early work was labelled opus no. 2, but remained unpublished until 1994. It was Hindemith himself who had blocked publication because he considered the work to be of insufficient quality, despite the fact that two weeks after its first performance at the Conservatory it won him a substantial money prize from the Mendelssohn-Stiftung.