Alex Ross

Bartók, like Igor Stravinsky and Alban Berg, had the fortune to be a popular modernist, appealing to a broad audience while keeping his place in the twentieth-century vanguard. His quartets exhibit an extraordinary degree of motivic coherence, their structures often extrapolated from a core motto of five or six notes. The string writing is at once violently inventive and acutely expressive, incorporating guttural distortions of pitch, cawing glissandos, clattering bowing effects, and the “Bartók…