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.

Late in life, Haydn reportedly expressed the wish that his canon of string quartets should be considered to have begun not with his very earliest works in the form, from the late 1750s, but with Op 9 ...

In a letter to the composer Zelter in 1829, Goethe described the string quartet as a conversation between four reasonable, intelligent people, and no one fostered that conversation with as much wit ...

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 ...

Performances in N.Y.C. Advertisement Supported by By Anthony Tommasini HAYDN: STRING QUARTET IN D (OP. 64, NO. 5); BRAHMS STRING QUARTET IN A MINOR (OP. 51, NO. 2) Danish String Quartet. Avi Music ...

(6) String Quartets, 'Erdödy', Movements: No. 4 in B flat, 'Sunrise' Chiaroscuro Quartet (6) String Quartets, 'Erdödy', Movements: No. 5 in D Chiaroscuro Quartet (6) String Quartets, 'Erdödy', ...

Despite their different opus numbers, which was a ploy of the original publisher to maximise sales, the six quartets of Op 71 and Op 74 are as much of a coherent group as any of Haydn's earlier sets.

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 ...

In his Op.76 string quartets Haydn shows us six faces, if not more. Each one of the half-dozen quartets ventures daringly in character. We see Haydn the courtly and the rustic, the warm-hearted and ...

That great 18th-century musical observer Charles Burney responded to Haydn's Op 76 quartets by describing them as being "full of invention, fire, good taste and new effects". The historically informed ...