There are six of them, and each one is a small catastrophe — the kind that leaves the room rearranged.
Béla Bartók wrote his six string quartets between 1908 and 1939, and they remain the most demanding cycle in the repertoire since Beethoven's late quartets. Not demanding in the sense of difficult to sit through. Demanding in the sense that they require something from you, some willingness to follow a mind that was always thinking harder than was comfortable.
The Alban Berg Quartet — Günter Pichler, Gerhard Schulz, Thomas Kakuska, and Valentin Erben — recorded this complete cycle for EMI in 1984 and 1987 at the Casino Zögernitz in Vienna. It arrived in the world quietly, the way essential things sometimes do.
The Room It Was Made In
The Casino Zögernitz is a nineteenth-century Viennese concert hall, and you can hear the room on these recordings. Producer Volkmar Fritsche and engineer Jobst Eberhardt gave the quartet air without flattering them into something prettier than the music warrants. The close-but-not-crowded placement of the microphones means you hear every bow articulation, every pressure change, every moment where Bartók's voicings create friction by design.
This is not a warm recording in the audiophile sense. It is an honest one.
The ABQ had been playing these quartets together for years before they recorded them. Pichler has said in interviews that the Bartók cycle was something the ensemble returned to continuously, that it never settled into a fixed shape for them. That restlessness is audible. There is no museum-piece stillness here — these performances move as if the players are still figuring something out.
What Bartók Was Actually Doing
The Third Quartet, from 1927, is where most listeners first feel the vertigo. It runs barely fifteen minutes, structured in a single-movement arc that Bartók called a "prima parte" and "seconda parte" with recapitulation, but the formal description does nothing to prepare you for the experience of it. The ABQ tears through it with a focus that is almost violent, and Kakuska's viola lines in the recapitulation have a particular rawness that I have not heard matched.
The Fourth and Fifth Quartets are the mountains at the center of the cycle. Bartók's arch-form structures — where movements mirror each other across a central axis — sound in lesser performances like an academic exercise. Here they sound inevitable.
The Sixth Quartet, written as Bartók prepared to flee Hungary for America, opens each of its four movements with a mesto — a mournful introduction that returns, slightly heavier each time, until it becomes the finale itself. The ABQ plays these mesto passages without sentiment and without detachment. Just attention, which turns out to be rarer than either.
The Record Itself
EMI's original CD pressings from this period have their critics — the transfer was considered too bright by some — but the music survives any format. If you can find the 2011 Warner Classics remaster, the low-end cello lines in the Second Quartet gain a body that the earlier pressings compressed somewhat.
I came back to this set after a long time away from serious listening. I put the Third Quartet on after everyone was asleep, volume lower than I thought I needed, and the room got very quiet in the way rooms do when something is actually happening.
Bartók didn't write music that rewards distraction. Neither did the Alban Berg Quartet record it for background. This is a set you sit with, and it sits back.