For the last six weeks, I have been taking walks with Bela Bartok. He has been an infuriating and fascinating companion, speeding me up, slowing me down or stopping me altogether. He’s like a complicated friend: charming but moody. Bartok died in 1945, yet listening exclusively to his six string quartets while walking on these cold winter days has made me feel I’m getting to know the man’s spirit. Or at least his music, which is not, traditionally speaking, uplifting. Sometimes I had to play phrases over and over. Often, I felt very sad or would become annoyed and lower the volume. Not today, Bela, not today.

Despite the connections musicologists make between Bartok and Liszt, Debussy, Strauss and Beethoven, my Bartok walks did not resemble time I’ve spent listening to those composers. The others inspired a sense of transcendence. Bartok’s quartets made me feel earthbound, as if he were my private guide and we were boring ever more deeply into the core of the planet rather than upward toward the heavens.

So why do it, why listen to the quartets? That’s a question that will come up more than once in this story. But for now, the answer is: I was listening to this music to prepare for a concert Sunday when the Borromeo String Quartet will perform all six of the quartets – the complete Bartok cycle – on one program in Minsky Hall at the University of Maine in Orono. In addition to the concert, the Borromeo, a Boston-based group, will offer a free lecture and preview at 7 p.m. Saturday at Dirigo Pines Retirement Community in Orono.

Between walks, I tracked down Bartok scholars and members of the Borromeo, which has received critical praise for this program at other venues in the country. In each conversation, I was told that the Bartok quartets, written over a 31-year period, are difficult, but that they mark one of the most important musical cycles in 20th century music. To hear them performed live in their entirety, I was told, is something between sublime and surreal.

But not for everyone.

“I remember as a kid attending concerts where the crowds definitely did not enjoy Bartok,” said Nicholas Kitchen, first violinist and co-founder of the Borromeo. “What I’ve realized over time is that with intricate music, performers need a lot of time to get comfortable with what they want to say with the work. By now, many performers, including us, feel as if we really do have a sense of what the full dramatic sequences of these works represent. They have within them all the emotional richness of works by Beethoven or Brahms or Mozart. I’m happy to see that that journey, starting in confusion and arriving at communication, is coming to a completion for a lot of people. If people have had that sense of frustration before, I think they will have a nice prize of being at home with the concert.”

One woman who attended the Borromeo’s all-Bartok program in New York City two years ago confirmed this response: “It’s an amazing odyssey. I was dreading it. I thought it would be arduous. I thought I wouldn’t understand the music. But it was exciting. They make a real case for the Bartok because they play it with such clarity and detail.”

At its most memorable, that detail involves driving, speech-like and dance-based rhythms throughout, as well as limping, or uneven, rhythms associated with Turkish folk music. In one movement, the musicians put down their bows and pluck their instruments. There are also segments with virtuosic swiftness, funereal slowness and hopscotching themes. There is counterpoint, counterpoint, counterpoint. Kitchen described one section as “night music,” resembling “the subtle sound you hear in the night, like crickets, very soft with a very special sense of awareness of wispy ideas.”

All very Bartok.

Bela from the Bloc

Bartok was born in Hungary but traveled widely, first collecting folk music throughout the Balkans, and then as a concert pianist and lecturer on new music when World War I prevented him from his ethnomusicology pursuits in the countryside. He was a quiet, gentle but passionate man, a member of an intelligentsia that did not want to abandon Europe when World War II broke out. Yet his hostility to Hitler and fascism made it impossible for him to stay in Hungary, and he and his wife sailed to New York City in 1940, a year after the final quartet was written.

The quartets present a psychological profile that few musicians would openly condone as an avenue into the music. They surely concede that the quartets mark the establishment and refinement of Bartok’s voice. But they might not pay much attention to his sickly childhood, his strong attachment to his mother, his plant and insect collections, or his penchant for younger women. In my thoughts, he is a frail, shy man with an angry internal storm, a long-ago broken heart and, eventually, a displaced patriotism for his homeland. After I watched a short visual biography that the Borromeo uses for its pre-concert lecture, I found myself tossing images of Budapest, Bartok and Hungarian folk art into the mix during my walks.

But engaging in the music isn’t that neatly accomplished. It takes a disciplined imagination, not just a willing one. Believe me, there’s a payoff.

When I told a cellist friend that I was going to hear the quartets all in one sitting, she said: “Get a lot of sleep the night before.”

Putting the warnings aside for a moment, it was Kitchen who offered the most intriguing words about Bartok. In talking about the fifth string quartet, he used a word I – and many others – wouldn’t have the guts to use in describing the quartets: beauty. “It reminds me of the great beauty in the work of Bach,” he said. “It’s a very profound beauty.”

When I asked where he thought that beauty came from, Kitchen paused and then added: “In all honesty, I think that is talent. I think composers are just as mystified about it as anyone else. Bartok was a devoted teacher but felt the real art of composition, which he carried out, was not something he could teach. In the end, there’s a seizing of a creative force, and a composer like Bartok somehow succeeded in grasping that energy and turning it into notes. I have a feeling it was just as mysterious for him as it is for us.”

So why do it?

“One of the reasons is that it’s actually not too much music to absorb,” said Kitchen. “It’s a little bit like if you were going to one of the longer operas. With this truly great composer, you can in this one sitting really take the journey from the first quartet to the sixth quartet. If you tried to do that with Beethoven – with 16 quartets – you just couldn’t do this,” said Kitchen.

The Borromeo isn’t the only group to have bitten off such a large piece of Bartok 60 years after his death. Two days ago, the Takacs Quartet performed the whole cycle in one sitting in Ann Arbor, Mich. There were two intermissions and boxed dinners.

Just do it

Elliott Antokoletz, a professor of musicology at the University of Texas in Austin, is a world-renowned Bartok scholar. Last fall in Indiana, where the Borromeo played the same program, he gave a keynote speech before the show.

“The quartets are probably considered Bartok’s greatest works,” said Antokoletz. “With all the piano music, the orchestral works and concertos, the quartets stand at the peak of his whole achievement. They define more clearly than any of the other genres his whole evolution.”

To prove this, Antokoletz, who spent summers early in his career studying at music schools in Maine, described each of the quartets in the context of the composer’s life. He has written books on this topic, and his explication was scholarly as well as anecdotal. Here are my paraphrased notes:

The first was written after a young violinist, with whom Bartok was in love, spurned him; it is sad and romantic. World War I was raging during the second, and Bartok was not able to travel freely to collect folk music; the piece has more of a compositional feel. By the time of the third, Bartok was traveling among his brilliant contemporaries in Europe; you can hear the influence of Expressionism. The fourth and fifth were written between the wars; they have neoclassical elements but share the experimentation of artists of the day: James Joyce in literature, Stravinsky in music, Picasso in art, Isadora Duncan in dance. Bartok wrote the sixth in 1939 as Hungary was under increasing pressure from the Nazis; the war and sense of loss are the backdrops to this melancholy piece.

The sixth is unfinished, said Antokoletz; Bartok was making notes for a final movement – a wild Romanian dance. In its absence, the piece remains mesto, the Italian musical notation for mournful. It is a haunting wrap-up. By no means does it characterize the entire cycle, however.

“The six string quartets all have tremendous power and tremendous energy and a playfulness behind them and a huge range of ideas,” said Kitchen, who performed chamber music in Maine when he was a boy. “This is really the work of a genius in terms of talent, one that has been developed from a high level to an incomparably higher level. When you do the six string quartets together, you come away with that impression much more powerfully than from any single quartet. When you hear the progression, you really do perceive that, in significant ways, each one went to a new level of musical discovery. It’s very much what you feel with Beethoven.”

But all six together? In one program? On one afternoon?

“Ouch,” was the response of Benjamin Suchoff, curator of the New York Bartok Archives from 1953 to 1967. “If all six were being performed, it would be overwhelming for me.”

Suchoff, also a Maine summer visitor as a boy, began listening to Bartok when he was a student at New York University in the 1950s. He had been casting around for a dissertation topic and came upon Bartok’s collection of more than 150 piano pieces.

“It was called ‘Mikrokosmos,’ and I began teaching it, but because Bartok was mostly unknown at that time, my advisers were skeptical,” said Suchoff, who is 87 and lives in Palm Beach, Fla. “They bombarded me with questions. ‘Do you like all of Bartok’s music?’ they asked. I said, ‘No.’ Everyone beamed. And I got my degree. To this day, I don’t like all of Bartok’s music. I tolerate some of it.”

Despite his moderation as a listener, Suchoff, who has written more than a dozen books on the composer, did not argue about the importance of Bartok: “He has been called the successor to Beethoven. He is considered one of the four great Bs in music: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Bartok. The quartets place him there.”

No one disagrees on that point.

When Suchoff heard the afternoon also included two 10-minute breaks (but no boxed dinner), he wryly said: “That’s nice. You may want to have an ambulance standing by.”

So why do it?

Go to the concert and walk with Bartok. That’s the only path to the answer.

The Maine Center for the Arts will present the Borromeo String Quartet playing the complete string quartets of Bela Bartok, 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 27, in Minsky Hall at the University of Maine. A pre-concert lecture will take place 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 26, at Dirigo Pines Retirement Community on Main Street in Orono. For information, call 581-1755. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.

Nicholas Kitchen, violinist

Physically, it’s an enormous challenge, but we love the energy of these works, and we’ve done them enough time to have a sense of our own pacing. They call on everything we know about string quartet playing. For our group, doing the Beethoven cycle was a formative experience. Following that with Bartok has really expanded and intensified that. Bartok would be happy to hear that because he felt he was speaking the language of Beethoven.

Mai Motobuchi, violist

Without a doubt, I love all of the Bartok quartets, but if I had to pick one, I would pick No. 5. I love how his mind works in this piece, especially when I am looking at the score. I still find more and more brilliance in the details – how he links each of the phrases and each of the parts and puts all the movements together. It’s like a fantastic jigsaw puzzle where each single piece makes sense when looking over the whole thing after it’s all done.

Yeesun Kim, cellist

My favorite quartet is No. 4, and in particular the third movement. It is in some ways the most difficult piece to listen to, but when one studies it for a long time, it is a treasure with endless interesting gems to offer. The third movement of this piece is improvisational, and vocal melodies set upon very beautiful and soft atmospheric chords underneath. It evokes deep feelings and memories that are distant but familiar to all of us in one way or another. I enjoy this dual quality in this movement very much.

William Fedkenheuer, violinist

Selecting a single Bartok quartet as a favorite is always quite a task as it usually ends up being the one you are playing at the moment. When all six are put before you, it becomes an embarrassment of riches! Bartok’s fourth quartet

has been sitting on top of the collection for me. Of course one of

the most wonderful second violin solos is in the third movement – and I get to play the very first note of the piece! A second violinist never gets to do that. Perhaps this plays a part in my bias.