The six string quartets of Bela Bartok, very well interpreted by the Takacs Quartet

The last hundred years have seen the composition of several quartets cycles of very high quality strings since that of Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) to that of Nicola Bacri (born 1961), through one of Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), Frank Bridge (1879-1941), Karl Weigl (1881-1949), Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881-1950), Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973), Egon Wellesz (1885- 1974) by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), Ernst Toch (1887-1964), Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959), Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), Walter Piston (1894-1976 ), Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), Howard Hanson (1896-1931), Richard Flury (1896-1967), Alexander Tansman (1897-1986), Marcel Mihalovici (1898-1985), of Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940), Randall Thompson (1899-1984), Ernst Krenek (1900-1991), Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986), Conrad Beck (1901-1986), Vissarion Shebalin ( 1902-1963), Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988), Michael Tippett (1905-1998), Benjamin Frankel (1906-1973), Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) of course, but also by Ahmet Adnan Saygun (1907-1991), Elliott Carter (born in 1908), Vagn Holmboe of (1909-1996), William Schuman (1910-1992), Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000), Donald Gillis (1912- 1978), Daniel Jones (1912-1993), David Diamond (1915-2005), Mordecai Seter (1916-1994), Milton Babbitt (born 1916), Isang Yun (1917-1995), of Richard Arnell (born 1917), George Rochberg (1918-2005), of Mieczysaw Weinberg (1919-1996), Leon Kirchner (born 1919), Robert Simpson (1921-1997), Iain Hamilton (1922 -2000), Ned Rorem (born 1923), Boris Tchaikovsky (1925-1996), Hans Werner Henze (born in 1926), of Einojuhani Rautavaara (born 1928), Donald Martino (1931-2005 ), Sofia Gubaidulina (born 1931), Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998), Peter Maxwell Davies (born 1934), Philip Glass (born in 1937), Jonathan Harvey (born 1939), of Boris Tishchenko (born 1939), Brian Ferneyhough (born in 1943), of Péteris Vasks (born 1946), Dmitry Smirnov (born 1948), Elena Firsova (born 1950), Philippe Fenelon (born 1952), by Wolfgang Rihm (born 1952), Françoise Choveaux (born in 1953), or again by Pascal Dusapin (born 1955), besides many isolated masterpieces. The set of string quartets that left us Béla Bartok (1881-1945) is one of the most important among them.