A weekend of intensive chamber music-making has from time to time served as an auspicious season-opener for Bromsgrove Concerts.

Generally performances and talks have centred around one composer, and previous objects of the Bromsgrove beady eye have included the complete string quartets of Beethoven and Shostakovich. These explorations have set a context against which the works under consideration have been evaluated anew, their threads giving valuable insights into the composer's development.

This year it was the turn of Bartok to attract music-lovers, many of them from distant corners of the country, to spend a weekend in Bromsgrove. Widely regarded as last century's masterpieces in the genre, his six string quartets came under the microscope, together with works by illustrious contemporaries and Hungarian compatriots.

Quartet-in-residence was the Duke Quartet, their relaxed manner well-suited to such an event (though perhaps not so appropriate to a more formal one-off gig). Their rapport and mutual sensitivity was obvious, and a still-youthful absence of the hardboiled meant their performances throbbed with edge-of-the-seat adrenalin.

And nor should we take for granted the sheer scale of their achievement here, preparing and rehearsing not only the Bartok giants, but also two quartets by Schnittke, one by Kodaly, various solo pieces, piano quintets by Shostakovich and Schnittke, and a taxing world premiere - and performing them all in one weekend.

I caught four of the Bartoks, and it was revealing to note how the late-romanticism of the First Quartet, so redolent of early Schoenberg, soon gave way to grittier, more nationalistic language - not just in terms of folk-music, but in psychology too, a la Kafka.

The strange, dark ending of a Second Quartet which had opened so lyrically was a grim preparation for the deeply personal voice of the Third, where one senses the composer has something of greater significance to say. Bartok's powerful imagination reaches its quintessential expression in the Fourth Quartet, motivically constructed, its five-movement arch with characteristically chirruping and buzzing "night music" as its keystone - and how clever of the programme-editor to print the movement tempi in an arch-form, too!

In all these readings the Dukes displayed enviable command of technique, sturdy control over the music's flow, and a huge appreciation of its importance. Some of the attaccas linking movements were ignored, and one wished occasionally for greater dynamic bite; but I had the benefit of a score, and what the players communicated was always convincing.

It was perhaps tactless, though, to programme the Schnittke quartets. I heard the Second, delivered with immense stamina in the face of the music's technical and physical demands: the audience played its part magnificently, too, with concentration almost a palpable presence in the room.

In this work personal grief and railing anger are expressed with an amazing gamut of compositional resource, everything unified by a subtext of Orthodox chant, and we can almost picture a soul winging to Heaven on a trilling melody which sounds as though it comes from an ethereal Ondes Martenot. I would trade all the Bartok quartets, almost selfconscious in their cleverness, for this one outpouring of genuine, controlled emotion.

Schnittke's equally affecting Piano Quintet and Shostakovich' s gnomic exampIe had pianist Rolf Hind joining the ensembIe for persuasive, gripping accounts.

Hind also contributed a wide-ranging solo recital, as well as (wearing his composer's hat) a Bromsgrove Concerts commission.

The Eye of Fire, its sequence of movements based on yoga positions, proved a fascinating half-hour of music for prepared piano (including a chain dragged across the strings and tabla-like drumming on various parts of the interior) and quartet, with the viola tuned a semitone lower.

Its sounds were intriguing, but however complex the score-notation, what we heard was refreshingly simple and unpretentious.