The third movement of Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 has made it on Ivan Hewett’s list of 50 classics by the world’s greatest composers.

Hewett on Bartók: “He wanted to escape from Germanic ideas of what music should be like, with its ‘tyranny of major-minor’ as he called it. And here, in the villages of his homeland, was a music that was miraculously free of those ideas. It was modal, and full of odd asymmetrical rhythms - as were the Rumanian, Bulgarian, and Turkish melodies that found their way onto Bartók’s cylinder recorder, as he tramped around Eastern Europe in search of old melodies.”

Find the full article on The Telegraph.