San Francisco Classical Voice

The Takács players really do contrive to remove the opposition from the oppositions, as it were. Take that matter of collective versus individual character, for example. With this ensemble, somehow they're both there, both always vivid, neither one depending for existence on the other's being compromised or attenuated. It's as though the environment of the quartet makes the playing of each musician more individual, more fully itself.

On first hearing the Takács after Geraldine Walther left her San Francisco Symphony principal viola post to join it, I remember thinking that she sounded more inimitably herself in the quartet than she had even as a soloist. I think now that that goes for all four players. The odd thing is that the individuality — the distinctness, the awareness always of who's playing what — not only doesn't harm "unanimity" (or "blend," or all those other things generally summed up as "collective personality"), but instead seems positively to enhance it.

Indeed, the Takács players don't have what you'd ordinarily call "matched sounds," and the internal balance of the quartet, at least on paper, looks a little odd. The first violinist, Edward Dusinberre, has a lightish, quicksilver sound next to which second violinist Károly Schranz's denser, more powerful timbre ought to sit oddly (or so you'd think). Then there's violist Walther, sort of a lusher, headier tenor version of Dusinberre, and finally András Fejér's intense, gutsy, intermittently explosive cello on the bottom. Somehow, add them up and what you get is a rich but transparent texture in which every chord is perfectly voiced and you can always hear the line that every note came from and where it's going. This is quartet alchemy at its best, and it's no more amenable to explanation than is any other branch of black magic.

Something of the same kind goes on with articulation. The Takács players collectively favor a resonant sound, yet with a lot of punch in the articulation in both the right and left hands. When they're articulating in unison, the frightening unanimity makes for attacks, and chords, that sound even louder than they are. Within individual lines, though, all that minute articulative attention subtly sets the lines apart from one another and draws attention now to this one, now to that.

On Sunday I repeatedly found myself noticing little details of part-writing, not because figures were given greater tonal heft than usual, but because my attention was drawn there by one player or another's ear-catching choice of bowstroke or tiny zing of vibrato. And again, somehow the multiplicity of little, individual inflections didn't diminish the sense of collective intent in the performance, but made it more vivid.

The Takács suite of virtues would be a formidable asset in any repertory, but in Beethoven, on Sunday, it was sheer delight. The quartet's account of the A-major Quartet, Op. 18/5, was agile, confident, expressively generous, and brim-full of motivic energy. The performance seemed uninhibitedly free, even outrageously exuberant on occasion (Féjer's wild, foot-stomping rendition of the slow movement's most raucous variation had to be heard to be believed). Yet the ensemble was razor-sharp and the tuning and blend were phenomenal. And you heard all that detail — all that minute, loving wealth of imagination — applied ceaselessly to the smallest of scales, even as, on the larger scale, the whole piece stood forth vividly. It was something to hear.

The Takács way was almost more fun in the C-minor Quartet, Op. 18/4, if only because the piece itself is a simpler, more blustery sort of beast, and the kinds of detail the Takács played up spiced the bluster rather than encumbering it. If it's possible to bluster in loving detail, the Takács did it in the finale, where the wackier later accompaniments to the first violin's mad Gypsy rondo theme bristled with amazing mock-ferocity. The second movement's clockwork fugato was another marvel, a bit of virtuoso articulational drollery.

As for the late A-minor Quartet, Op. 132, which followed intermission, I don't think I have ever heard a performance of the piece so deservedly sure of itself, technically and interpretively. Again you noticed the great wealth of inner detail, and, both with it and against it, the great collective sense of the work's longer trajectories. Again, too, you felt a technical command that was all the more phenomenal for being employed so seemingly spontaneously.

All the work's colors and moods were vivid, sharp, distinct: the desolate striving of the outer movements; the blithe simplicity of the second movement's Trio; the great, glowing serenity of the central "Heiliger Dankgesang"; the quirky, comical strut of the little march following it; the desperate torrent of recitative that sweeps away the march and brings on the finale. And yet all of it seemed to belong to one thing, belonging not despite all the variety but somehow, in part, because of it — rather like the members of the Takács Quartet.

Under the auspices of Cal Performances, which brought us Sunday's recital, the Takács Quartet returns to Hertz Hall on March 25, 2007, with more Beethoven: Opp. 18/1, 74, and 131. The concert is, naturally, already sold out, but anyone remotely interested in great chamber-music playing ought to try to be there. It honestly does not get any better than this.