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.

Between 1757 and 1799, Franz Joseph Haydn completed 67 string quartets. Every one, even the lightweight early divertimentos, has something in it to enjoy. Many of the last quartets are masterpieces.

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 ...

In many ways the Amadeus Quartet was the leading string quartet of the LP era. They made their first recordings for Deutsche Grammophon in 1951 and continued to record for the label almost up to their ...

The London Haydn Quartet are working their way through their eponymous composer's string quartets slowly and chronologically; Hyperion released the Op 9 set in 2007, while those of Op 17 came out two ...

In other words, this is music that contains multitudes – open to limitless interpretative possibilities. The very packaging of these releases from the Zaïde and the period-instrument London Haydn ...

A disc of 21 mazurkas, far from concentrating on too narrow a spectrum, only goes to show the variety of emotion and poetic expression that Chopin embodied in these sublime pieces. That impression is ...

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 ...

Under recent directorships, it and other “heritage” art-form programs frequently have felt like tick-box afterthoughts to schedules dominated by ostensibly contemporary, genre-­shattering items.