29. Young Musicians Series

The Rider in the Night

These are two mighty quartets. The Bartók is a powerful exercise in cramming a life poem into as small amount of time as possible. It is amongst Bartók’s most extreme compositions, its four movements are played without a break oscillating from jagged outbursts to strains of the mountain people’s folk music that he loved so much. Schubert on the other hand was the exact opposite, preferring to spread out his music as far as he could make it stretch. It is probably the most popular quartet ever written with its savage vision of the rider galloping through the night trying to outpace death. Every young Quartet has to play this work, an unavoidable rite of passage.