Taking a New Tack

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The Takács Quartet favored the Bay Area with fairly regular visits even before our own Geraldine Walther became a member in 2005, but in these last two years we have, gratifyingly, heard a lot of them. Sunday’s visit to Berkeley’s Hertz Hall, courtesy as usual of the indispensable Cal Performances, was nonetheless a departure.

Takács Quartet

Last season’s Takács recitals were all-Beethoven programs. Sunday’s recital offered a change of diet: a rich, meaty program of Haydn, Bartók, and Schumann. For the next visit, in mid-March, it’s back to Beethoven (Op. 59/3 and Op. 130, the latter with the Grosse Fuge as finale), and I’m not fool enough to complain. All the same, I was glad of the chance to hear the quartet in its new configuration tackling something else.

The six pieces of Opp. 71 and 74 were Haydn’s first quartets deliberately conceived for public performance — they were among the attractions of the composer’s second London tour, in 1794 — and they are designed to dazzle. One feature they all share is a brief introduction before the main business of the first movement gets under way, a device generally assumed to have been Haydn’s way of getting a large, rowdy audience to settle down and listen.

In the C-Major Op. 74/1, the Takács’ concert-opener, the “noise-killer” is just two chords, a long one resolving to a short one, then a rest after which the movement proper begins. Had Sunday’s capacity audience needed any quieting (it didn’t), I think the Takács’s firm, timbrally resplendent intro would have silenced even the least attentive. It’s vexingly harder than it looks on the page to make that opening not sound silly.

The Takács players approached Op. 74/1 on the right scale. It was a “big” performance, not stinting the top of the dynamic range and, at times, aggressively broad in gesture. (The drone passages in the finale got the full slowed-down, stomping rustic treatment.) At the same time, there was consistent transparency of texture, and little of the outsize timbral heaviness that modern-instrument quartets sometimes fall into in the more big-boned late Haydn quartets.

In Perfect Balance

The Takács’s bowing style (lots of bow, lots of air, ceaseless energy and variety of attack) ensured that everything was audible, nothing buried. And, as usual with this ensemble, each player’s line was consistently distinct, individual, and alive to the others. There may be another quartet out there that can manage the Takács trick of perfect balance with four such strongly personal sounds, but if so I haven’t heard it.

First violinist Edward Dusinberre’s quicksilver passagework in that finger-twisting finale — matched later by the other players as the movement threatens to break into a full-fledged fugue — was a particular delight. But the less flashy inner movements were as fine. The slow movement is really only a slowish movement, an Andantino grazioso. The simplicity of texture and the theme’s little chromatic inflections almost suggest Mozart, but the increasingly wild harmonic excursions that Haydn takes it on do not.

In the Menuet’s Trio, meanwhile, we’re almost in early-Schubert-land, with a sudden move to remote A major and a tune of almost preternatural innocence. The Takács players in both movements were generous, songful, and light of touch, but capable of darkening their sounds arrestingly at an unexpected turn of harmony.

At the time violist Walther left the San Francisco Symphony for the Takács, a bit over two years ago, press accounts of her move made much of the fact that, as a career orchestral player, she would in essence have to learn the quartet repertoire from scratch. That was, of course, a gross exaggeration. A good orchestral string player, especially such a dedicated chamber musician as Walther was in her Symphony years, has almost certainly bashed through most of the core quartet repertoire for fun, probably many times over.

All the same, there are pieces that people don’t just sit down and read through for the hell of it, even players at Walther’s level, and the Bartók quartets are among them. The Takács has, furthermore, built much of its reputation on Bartók. (Second violinist Károly Schranz and cellist András Fejér have already participated in two Takács recordings of the complete quartets, once in the mid-1980s with the quartet’s original lineup and again about a decade ago with Dusinberre as first violin.) If Walther found it at all daunting to learn the Fifth Quartet on the fly in such company, though, it was impossible to tell from her gleefully intense playing Sunday.

Indeed, she seemed once again uncannily at home in the ensemble. Something about the way her airy, heavily vibrated sound mirrors Dusinberre’s, in comparison with the grittier sounds of the two Hungarians, worked exceptionally well where Bartók pits lower strings against violins, as he does frequently in the outer movements of this work. At places, that arrestingly heady timbre of hers startled me initially, then came to seem exactly right. In the Trio of the central Bulgarian-rhythm Scherzo she sang out like a strange bird.

Doing the Impossible

That Scherzo had just the right air of insouciant ease to its maddening rhythmic intricacies. Gotten right, like this, it looks and feels impossible and simple at the same time, like riding a unicycle. The slow movements on either side, with their strange, sparse gestures, were suffused with otherworldly colors. The outer movements, for their part, were magnificently played, all slashing bow and ringing sound and fiercely channeled rhythmic abandon. This may be one of the more severe Bartók quartets, but Sunday it was difficult to see how anyone could fail to be carried away by it.

The Takács players having managed, after several curtain calls, finally to leave the stage after the Bartók without being obliged to deliver an encore, they returned after intermission with pianist Joyce Yang for the Schumann Piano Quintet. Yang, in her early 20s and a Van Cliburn Competition silver medalist (among other things), proved to be a strong if slightly brittle player and a sensitive chamber music partner. She stressed the part’s brilliance, only occasionally lacking perfect control in the passagework, but accompanied gracefully when called upon to do so.

The Takács players, meanwhile, rather wallowed in the juicier material of the first movement, and who can blame them? Once or twice Walther and Dusinberre between them larded on so much sweet vibrato that it was too much even for me. The first trio of the Scherzo, for one, redlined my cloy-o-meter. But the slow movement’s funeral march was terrifically controlled, spare and skeletal, while the finale was lean and propulsive.

Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.