Work: String Quartet no. 13 in B flat major, Op.130

A broken string near the beginning of the “Große Fuge” was emblematic of the intensity the Juilliard String Quartet gave to their performances of Beethoven and Bartók.

Arrangements aplenty as the Australian Chamber Orchestra take on Bach's Art of Fugue and Beethoven's Op.130, with Richard Tognetti the accomplished soloists in Mozart's Violin Concerto no. 5.

At one point in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator is listening to a sonata for piano and violin by the fictional Vinteuil, when “at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he tried to grasp the phrase or harmony – he did not know which – that had just been played and that had opened and expa

The noted Beethoven pianist Artur Schnabel was famously interested only in music that he felt was “better than it can be performed”. This idea of works which transcend any individual performance seems particularly true when it comes to Beethoven’s late string quartets, enigmatic masterpieces which continue to pose challenges to interpreters nearly two centuries after they were written.