E-Mail This Article to a Friend All of him The Borromeo String Quartet goes for the Bartók cycle, plus the Fischer Duo BY DAVID WEININGER

The six quartets of Béla Bartók form the greatest cycle of chamber music by a single composer since the 15 quartets of Beethoven. They abound with invention — in harmony, rhythm, form, color, and all-out new sounds. Although they show up regularly on concert programs, and recordings abound, it’s most unusual to see them all performed in a single concert. The challenges — physical, musical, conceptual — are daunting. Nonetheless, the Emerson Quartet famously made its Carnegie Hall debut in just that way. And this Tuesday, one of Boston’s favorite local foursomes, the Borromeo String Quartet, will play all six at Jordan Hall. Some concerts are promising; some are eagerly anticipated. This one should be regarded as a gift to the music community. It’s even free.

"It’s enough music that you can really relish every single part of that journey," says Borromeo first-violinist Nicholas Kitchen when I reach him by phone. But even though that journey takes about three hours, with intermission, you might think it would be an intense and fatiguing three hours. Kitchen says he’s been surprised to find that, on the eight or nine previous occasions that they’ve played the cycle, the result is exhilaration rather than exhaustion. "Before we’d done it, we kind of wondered if there would be a kind of dragged-across-the-finish-line feeling to it at the end. But it didn’t turn out that way at all. We’re very tired, of course, when we’re done, but not tired as in gasping for breath. It’s actually a very thrilling feeling."

Part of what staves off the fatigue is the variety of the music, which ranges from jagged dissonances and tricky rhythms to eerie night sounds and long, forlorn melodies. Bartók was famous for developing symmetric, arch-shaped structures in his works, and the quartets as a whole have something of that shape. "It’s interesting how the First Quartet starts with this very slow, extremely expressive music," Kitchen points out, "and in some way, the quartets end with that as well. The last movement of the Sixth Quartet is this truly adagio feeling of musical communication. What I find is that both of them have this exquisite sense of counterpoint, of the way the intervals between the parts have this very intense sense of emotional connection to the way the music is built."

The difference, he continues, is that in the later work there is "an almost unbelievable relationship of emotional power to simplicity. You can listen to the first page of the First Quartet and know that you’re hearing a great composer, but then you hear the end of No. 6 and you know that you’ve heard a great composer who has reinvented himself countless times, who has transformed the depths of what he’s doing in a way that’s really stunning."

Compare that with the fast movements of the Fourth and Fifth Quartets, each one a dizzying outburst of counterpoint. "You’re at the absolute opposite extreme. Just the demands on instrumental technique, where it’s just speed alone." Kitchen describes the finale of the Fifth: "Parts are supposed to pile on top of one another in a comprehensible, exciting, fun, exhilarating, scary, clear way. It’s writing at the limit. We have to work incredibly hard to get anywhere near that threshold."

You can get a sense of how challenging it is from a video compilation of the Borromeos’ favorite Bartók performances that’s available in their "Living Archive" series. Drawn from concerts over the last year and a half, the two-DVD set features especially intense renderings of the Second and Fifth Quartets that show off the players’ physical, interactive style. (Next week’s concerts will also be recorded and made available in both audio and video formats. Details are available at the group’s Web site, www.borromeoquartet.org.)

What hearing the quartets in one go offers that a more leisurely traversal doesn’t is an absolutely direct understanding of Bartók’s process of transformation — not only of his own musical style but of the quartet form. "It opens a level of discovery that you only find when you’re in that situation," Kitchen explains. "When you go from that movement of No. 5 and then a few moments later you’re transported into the opening viola solo of No. 6, you realize what it meant for the composer to go from those extremes. Until you hear them in a single flow, the range which is covered just doesn’t really register. And when you hear it this way, it registers in a way that’s truly amazing."

The Borromeo String Quartet plays the six string quartets of Béla Bartók this Tuesday, March 1, at 7 p.m. at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street in Boston. Admission is free; call (617) 585-1122.

TWO TO GET READY. If a three-hour Bartók marathon just isn’t enough and you need more music in your evening . . . well, then you’re sick, plain and simple. In which case, you should head over to the Boston Conservatory, where you can hear the excellent Fischer Duo. That’s cellist Norman Fischer and pianist Jeanne Kierman, who play an inventive concert mixing the new — Pierre Jalbert, Shih-Hui Chen, and William Bolcom — with the less new — Chopin’s Cello Sonata and an arrangement La lugubre gondola, Liszt’s elegant memorial to Wagner. This one starts at 5:30 p.m. on March 1 at the Conservatory’s Seully Hall, 8 the Fenway, and it’s free as well; call (617) 912-9240.