Pro Arte Quartet to perform Bartok Cycle

Bela Bartok’s string quartets are monumental not just in 20th century music, but in the entire string quartet literature.

Do you know the legacy of the Pro Arte Quartet at UW–Madison? Visit the sesquicentennial Web site to find out.

UW–Madison’s Pro Arte Quartet will perform all six Bartok string quartets in two splendid concerts on Saturday, November 21. The concerts will begin at 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. at the Wisconsin Union Theater. University of California-Santa Barbara musicologist Michael Beckerman will present a mid-concert lecture at 7:00 p.m. in the Memorial Union.

The twentieth century has known no greater musical personality than Bela Bartok — a brilliant and original composer who drew inspiration from both his classical contemporaries and the folk melodies of his homeland.

Born in Hungary in 1881, he was a pianist, theorist, music historian and teacher. He wrote primarily for instruments rather than voices, and over the course of his career revolutionized virtually every concept of tonality in existence.

Bartok’s six landmark string quartets – written between 1908 and 1939 – are masterpieces of structure and balance. He brilliantly used an original system of tonal organization, which drew as much from the non-Western scales of Hungarian folk music as it did from any traditional sense of tonality. Each quartet is a unique marvel of simple melodies, rough dissonances, rhythmic complexity and harmonic abstraction.

The Pro Arte Quartet continues to maintain an 85-year tradition of dedication to classical and contemporary string chamber music.

In addition to their residency at the UW–Madison where duties range from formal concerts and radio broadcasts to a variety of educational activities, the quartet tours nationally and internationally, often presenting premieres of new works, many of which are written for the ensemble.

In 1940, the quartet accepted a residency at the UW–Madison, the first such residency at a major American university. Today the Pro Arte functions as a cultural resource for the University and the state. The Pro Arte Quartet appears under the sponsorship of the Wisconsin Union Directorate Performing Arts Committee and is co-sponsored by the UW–Madison School of Music. Tickets for each concert, at $7.00 each ($5.00 for UW–Madison students), and the buffet dinner, at $18.00, are available at the Union Theater Box Office in the Memorial Union, or by calling (608) 262-2201. Additional information is available at Union Theater Web site.