The prospect was daunting: a three-, possibly four-hour concert program of all six quartets by the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok. Nearly everyone who follows chamber music has heard one of the quartets played on a mixed program, often paired with a quartet by Beethoven. But all six in one afternoon?

Boston musician Nicholas Kitchen said last week that the complete Bartok cycle, written between 1908 and 1939, was actually a manageable amount of music for performers and listeners to take in during one sitting, and he was right. Kitchen is the first violinist for the Borromeo String Quartet, which performed the Bartok works Sunday in Minsky Hall at the University of Maine. He and his ensemble-mates – violinist William Fedkenheuer, violist Mai Motobuchi and cellist Yeesun Kim – made what threatened to be a marathon feel more like a 200-yard dash.

That’s not to say the group raced through the program, however. The musicians were meticulous, careful, judicious. They took their time and allowed each quartet to sing its own song, uncover its own nuances. Both the immense sadness and Hungarian peasant dance spirit of these works came through. The musicians also found the humor buried within these often tortured works, and they glided through what have to be some of the most complicated rhythms in the literature.

In a short space, it would be impossible to give a full estimation of each work. Here are some highlights. Quartet No. 1 is a lament for love lost. In performance, the cello made the journey from profound sadness to anger, and finally all four instruments resounded with a final declaration: I am Hungarian, and you can break my heart but you cannot sever the roots that bind me to my origins. This was echoed again and again during the afternoon.

Quartet No. 2 notched up the drama, with bows hopping and Arabic strains calling out from the heart of the piece. The music throbbed and swirled, and the true purpose for hearing this live came to light: You could watch while the musical lines were passed from one instrument to another, starting in the hands of one string player and ending up being passed through everyone’s hands. It was three-dimensional Bartok.

The third quartet reminded me of reality TV. It was as if the musicians were meeting the music with a freshness that comes only in live events. They were entirely studied in their roles, but still looked as if they were discovering the score for the first time. This quartet let me focus on the cellist and violist, who played so luxuriously together that I found my eyes being drawn to them frequently throughout the rest of the afternoon. At the end, the audience made its first whooping sounds of awe and gratitude.

Some talk of the “bugs-in-the-night” sound of Quartet No. 4 – and that was given its full expression by the Borromeo, which seemed like a beehive working at a buzzing pace. In the fourth movement, the musicians shelved their bows and picked out the pizzicato. In another movement, they used the bows to bang on the necks of their violins. Occasionally, the audience chuckled, as if with relief.

Or anticipation. Quartet No. 5 is the most philosophical. For me, this quartet probed theological themes – lovely, sad, unsure. The musicians played with reverence, reaching far down to the low notes and practically screaming “wake up!” with the more aggressive phrases. Bartok was an atheist, and if any of the quartets is about that position, it’s this one. It may also be the most beautiful of the six, ending with a carnivalesque lullaby that is brief but revelatory.

The final quartet had the mood of intellectual hand-wringing, interspersed with the mimicry of Hungarian voices singing in chorus. Those voices did not call out in delight, however, and this piece ended the concert on a sad note, as well as in the silence that the musicians held for what must have been a full 10 seconds.

Then the audience was on its feet with cheers of appreciation and amazement. The Borromeo, which was called back onstage four times by the booming applause, took the audience on a powerful journey. It was not an electric performance; it was heady, dynamic and engaging.