WGBH has hosted many string quartets in its performance studio. Hear three of the best, playing music by Joseph Haydn. Two hundred years ago — May 31, 1809, to be exact — Joseph Haydn died at age 76.

"Around string players, it's a misty goal, like climbing Mount Everest. Everybody aspires to it." Violinist and violist Anthony Martin is talking about performing all 68 of Joseph Haydn's completed ...

In its recitals at Wigmore Hall the Doric String Quartet has shown an affinity for Haydn. The set of six quartets, Op.20, written when the composer was 40, catch him in the white heat of experiment, ...

In many ways the Amadeus Quartet was the leading string quartet of the LP era. They made their first recordings for Deutsche Grammophon in 1951 and continued to record for the label almost up to their ...

Two years ago, Haydn's bicentenary caused many to take him a lot more seriously. The New Zealand String Quartet swept us through 20 quartet movements from Opus 1 to 103, revealing just why Haydn is ...

For string quartet lovers, a new release by the Takács Quartet is always reason to celebrate. In recent years, their vividly intense recordings of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, not to mention Bartok ...

Haydn wrote the six quartets of Opp 54 and 55 in 1788, by now a celebrated composer across Europe and still opera Kapellmeister at Esterházy. These period instrument players, whose very name declares ...

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Is the Bay Area really the center of classical music disruption, the region’s favorite term? Last week offered some reasons to think so. There was the news that the San Francisco Symphony had made Esa ...

The six string quartets of Haydn’s Op 33 include two of his most popular – the ones nicknamed the Joke and the Bird, justifying his claim that the works were written “in a completely new and special ...