Preview: Takacs Quartet/Muzsikas/Marta Sebestyen, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

When the celebrated Takacs Quartet take to the Queen Elizabeth Hall stage tomorrow, they will be accompanied by a quartet of a very different sort - the Hungarian Muzsikas ensemble, plus the folk singer Marta Sebestyen. And what the assembled company then do will be unprecedented in this auditorium.

"We will try to create a unified musical pleasure," says Muzsikas's bassist Daniel Hamar. But how will the two ensembles relate to each other? "First, we will set up an atmosphere with 20 minutes of Hungarian folk music, then the Takacs will start playing Bartok's Fourth Quartet, but we will insert traditional tunes in between movements."

Next, a Bartok violin duo performed by a folk player and a classical player; and when the Takacs then plays Bartok's Romanian Dances, Hamar will add his bass sound. "I'll play on gut strings with a short bow for an un-classical effect."

Muzsikas are classically trained, but started playing Hungarian village music during the folk revival of the Seventies. "We listened to archive recordings made by Bartok himself," says Hamar, "but realised it couldn't be done using classical techniques. So we went to the villages to discover how it should be done. In the end, we only found what we needed from Hungarian musicians living in Romania."

In addition to violins and a viola, they often add a flute, zither and gardon - a drum with strings that makes a merry medieval sound. They hold their violins with the neck in the palm of the hand, and bowing is more energetic than in classical music, since this music is mostly for dancing to.

Now, says Hamar, such music is rarely played by villagers, so its survival depends on groups such as his. "But we're not presenting a museum culture. Last year, we played this music at a contemporary-music festival, and at the London Jazz Festival, and it went down very well at both!"

Tomorrow (0870 401 8181; www.rfh.org.uk)