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More than 40 years ago, violist Kazuhide Isomura got together with three other Japanese students at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan and formed the Tokyo String Quartet. After touring the globe for upward of 4,000 performances, more than 40 for Music Toronto, with 40 albums and nearly 40 years of teaching at Yale, last night, Mr Isomura played his final Music Toronto concert.

People want to be in love and to live forever. That is not how things work out. Haydn explores this contradiction in his string quartets. What makes each quartet different is how Haydn resolves musically the way things do work out.

The virtuoso pianist Marc-André Hamelin played a program of works by Bach, Fauré, Ravel and Rachmaninov, bracketed by his own Variations on a theme by Paganini. Last March in Toronto, when Hamelin snuck this piece into the program as an encore, I wrote that it was “ten minutes of the most fun you’ll ever have crowding around a piano at the end of party.

Bartók used folk music to find his own voice as a composer of classical music. He roamed the Balkans, north Africa and the Middle East to rediscover models of what was really music to his ears, much in the same spirit as Picasso and others searched out models of primitive representations to refresh what we see.

The string quartet is a peculiar beast in the classical music world. It takes a dash of talent, a sprinkling of luck, and a lot of social skills to make it in a professional, full-time string quartet. Many quartets are plagued with internal conflicts and member changes; however, the Lafayette Quartet seems to have defied the statistics in this category, almost miraculously.