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.

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 ...

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 ...

London Haydn Quartet Hyperion CDA 67877 (2 CDs for the price of 1)**** This may be the third volume in the London Haydn Quartet's survey of the quartets of Haydn, but it's also the point at which, ...

The reason we play string quartet is that we want to share the heart of music with our audience. Music is communication, and the string quartet is the ultimate form of communication. We communicate ...

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 ...

The Maxwell Quartet draws fascinating parallels between the music of Joseph Haydn, the father of the string quartet, and Scottish folk music in their latest release, this week’s Feature Album on ABC ...

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 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, ...

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 ...