Quator Diotima

Bartok Complete String Quartet Quator Diotima

Following on from its highly-acclaimed complete cycle of string quartets from the Viennese School, the Quatuor Diotima reaches new heights in its discography with

a recording of some of the most sig-nificant works of the 20th century music: the six quartets of Béla Bartok, born out of the different artistic and political influ-ences of

the time. "These six quartets give us a genuine overview of the composer's personal life, from his first disappointment in love to the heartbreaking farewell to his mother and his homeland. The evolution of his musical language is equally spectacular. Starting with a post-Romanticism imbued with folklore, still very present in the first

two quartets, the Bartókian identity is ful-ly asserted in the great works of his maturity that are the Third, Fourth and Fifth Quartets, and culminates in the highly individual

form of the Sixth Quartet, one great song of despair and nostalgia. [...] There is a before and an after Bartók in the quartet world. He renews, reinvents all the issues of the genre, the question of the relationship between the voices of the quartet governing the forms, the search for the 'little difference', the search for heterogeneity in so homogeneous a medi-um."