There are occasional moments in Bartók’s String Quartet No. 1 when the gloom lifts, when the densely woven musical lines pause momentarily for a spot of pure, consonant sunniness. In the string ...

The Concerto for Orchestra was composer Bela Bartok's last completed work; he did not live to finish either the Third Piano Concerto or the Viola Concerto that followed it. In these last works, all ...

Was the famous Hungarian composer the forefather of bands like Rush and Yes? The Chiara String Quartet breaks it down. The celebrated classical music composer Béla Bartók was really into folk music. I ...

James Ehnes's outstanding Bartók series for Chandos continues with the early romantic Sonata BB 28 (1903), Hungarian Folk Songs and Romanian Folk Dances. The key work, however, is the unaccompanied ...

Béla Bartók’s six string quartets are nearly universally regarded as a summit of 20th-century chamber music. Their prestige can spill over to those ensembles that play these challenging works ...

Isabelle Faust's recording of Bartók's violin concertos marks her long-awaited return to a composer with whose sonatas she was closely associated early in her career. The first concerto was neither ...

In 1943, Bela Bartok’s finances were a wreck and his health was failing fast due to complications from leukemia. And yet the ailing composer still had one, final masterpiece to create. Thanks to a ...

At the start of his great career, when Composer Bela Bartok was about to become a piano instructor at the Budapest Academy of Music, he fell in love with a former academy student. 17-year-old ...

Like many another composer, Hungary’s Bela Bartók lived and died a poor man. His sour and peppery music was bitterly condemned by many critics; audiences seemed to like it even less. Mostly it got ...