When you go to a four-hour concert of music by Béla Bartók, the composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist, you know that you’re going to have an interesting audience. The music is not easy, but it is full of vibrancy and vitality with a rhythmic undercurrent that drives the music like a wild beast. It broods, prances, twists, dances; a passionate amalgamation of Eastern-European folk melodies and musical brilliance that is searing in its intensity.

As the Takacs Quartet began an evening of the six Bartók string quartets Sunday night at the University of Michigan’s Rackham Auditorium, there was a mood of excitement and anxiety in the audience. After all, how many people had ever heard all of Bartók’s string quartets in one sitting, especially in a live concert? The audience was full of young people, some old subversive-looking types with poofy hair and bouncing urbanite voices, scholars (or snobs) who followed the music with their score in hand and lastly, my favorite: the people who wore hoodies and jeans to the concert, beating their feet and banging their heads as best they could to keep up with the infectious and irregular pulse of the music.

Although advertised as a four-hour event, the quartets actually totaled about two hours and 45 minutes, with a break for dinner not originally in the scores. Bartók’s first quartet was written in 1908 and his last in 1939, so the quartets in a sense chronicle his musical development from a youthful, lovelorn 27 year old to a sickly but mature 58 year old. The quartets are a whirlwind of musical experimentation and transformation, full of technical innovations mixed with a close look at the history of folk music in Eastern Europe. The two aspects come together in a way that is startling. In each quartet, there is at least one moment (and usually many more) in which the listener gets to hear a sound, harmony or melody that they have never before imagined. Whether it is the pulsing octaves throughout the first quartet, the slow mystical stasis of the third movement of the fourth quartet or the rising glissando chords in the fourth movement of the fifth quartet, one gets the sense that Bartók is firmly on his own ground, forging sounds and rules that are uniquely his own.

The Takacs Quartet brought to life the spontaneous and driving energy of the quartets, playing with a distinctive passion and emotion that felt almost dangerous, as if we were teetering close to the edge of a great abyss. Their fierce trills and long sweeping lines were sometimes followed by a disorienting spine-tingling stillness. The suddenness and ease with which they shifted moods and styles was remarkable. They intensely watched each other’s movement, banging their feet and bows with fervor and operating like one single fluid entity. This was the kind of performance that makes a person desperately want to learn to play the viola, even if he has told lots of bad viola jokes over the years.

The height of the evening was the fourth quartet, in which the fourth movement, consisting only of pizzicato (plucking of the strings), brought forth awed laughter from the audience as an aural wrestling match appeared to unfold. After the highly charged fifth movement, the crowd gave the quartet a lusty standing ovation. The music seemed to grow fresher and ever more electric as the night progressed.

The success of this concert was perhaps in part due to its unique design and execution: the venue was shaped like an amphitheatre, which lent a definite intimacy to the event. In addition, the ambitious goal of playing all six quartets in one night attracted a crowd that was enthusiastic about the music and added a sense of community to the concert. As the last notes echoed in the hall, one felt as though he had come from a long journey, in which he had seen and suffered alongside Bartók – questioning and absorbing the world, guided by the emotions and energies of the Takacs quartet. He had confronted a world filled with joy and longing, tradition and transformation, and above all, intensity.