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Adding Leafy Branches to the Takács Tree

Michelle Dulak Thomson on October 13, 2009
Four years have passed since ex–San Francisco Symphony Principal Violist Geraldine Walther became the newest member of the Takács Quartet, and by now the ensemble sounds as though it’s been together forever. In the first of this season’s two Cal Performances recitals (happily, the two-concert-a-year rhythm looks to be an established pattern), there were a few untidy moments. But the concert, given Sunday at Berkeley’s Hertz Hall, saw the quartet preserving and even intensifying that near-miraculous balance of unanimity and individuality that has been its hallmark since Walther joined it in 2005.
Takács Quartet

The presenter’s press release for this program sold it oddly short, calling Op. 71/1 “one of Joseph Haydn’s best-known mature works.” If anything, it’s among the least familiar Haydn quartets of the 1790s, a piece I’ve never heard performed live except in the course of a Haydn marathon or a complete cycle, nor seen recorded except as part of the set of six (Opp. 71 and 74, three quartets to each opus) to which it belongs. Actually, apart from “the Rider” (Op. 74/3), none of these six “Appónyi” Quartets (so-called after their dedicatee) can be called really popular.

Which makes the Takács’ evident determination to work its way methodically through the set — the ensemble offered Op. 74/1 here two years back, while Op. 71/2 is slated for next February’s Cal Performances recital — all the more welcome. Doubly welcome is the news that the quartet is recording all six for the Hyperion label, release pending in 2011.

The Takács way with Haydn is familiar by now. Without in any way sounding like a period-instrument quartet, the players contrive to emphasize the same things the best “period” groups do: the independence and individuality of the lines, the sharp outlines of particular gestures, the joy of letting the physical interaction of bow and string and acoustic draw the sound out of the instruments, rather than pressing it out like toothpaste out of a tube. The scale is big — aptly so in these, the first quartets written explicitly for public performance — but nothing sounds bellowed.

Op. 71/1, like most of this set, has big-boned outer movements with much muscular first-violin writing. Edward Dusinberre, the ensemble’s leader, handled the passagework deftly, only occasionally letting it be apparent that it’s hard work. His intonation, though, was surprisingly erratic, especially in the first movement, which got off to a sour start with its five-chord introduction and never quite settled.

The odd off-note was forgotten, though, in the wealth of detail the Takács brought to light in the music. Best of all, perhaps, was the hushed reprise in the slow movement, where the original instrumental lines are delicately decorated with little rolled grace-notes, almost like the strumming of a lute. The way the players darted nimbly in and out of the texture in the Menuetto’s Trio section was almost as delightful, while the quartet lit into the finale’s dueling up- and down-scales with gleeful abandon. These are people who know how to have fun with their Haydn.

Bleak Stuff, Played Ferociously Well

Shostakovich has not loomed large in the Takács’ repertoire before now — indeed, over the course of a busy quarter-century-plus recording career, they’ve yet to record a Shostakovich quartet, nor have I ever heard them play one before. Moreover, for an ensemble first dipping its toes into these waters, the terse, enigmatic No. 11 (in F minor, Op. 122) is an unusual choice.

The first of four quartets dedicated to the individual members of the Beethoven Quartet (who by that point had been premiering Shostakovich’s quartets for a couple of decades), it arrived after the death of its honoree, second violinist Vassily Shirinsky. If it represents a character portrait of the man, he must have been a mercurial and yet oddly single-minded individual, with a mordant sense of humor. The piece is in seven tiny movements, most of them concerned somehow with a little melodic tag — barely the sketch of a theme. There’s a dry, fugal “Scherzo”; a “Recitative” that’s more like an explosion of frustration; a whirling, fugitive “Étude”; a biting “Humoresque” under which the second violin hews savagely at two alternating notes like a demented cuckoo; and an “Elegy” with the tread of a funeral march. In the end, the fugue subject comes back, along with the sinuous, quizzical line that opens the entire piece, and the piece evaporates into silence.

It is pretty bleak, withdrawn stuff, even by late-Shostakovich standards, and not (I would have thought) congenial territory for a quartet as invested as the Takács is in warmth and variety of sound. Yet it came off well, surprisingly so. True, the flat, dead sound the players adopted for the fugue subject seemed almost too baldly artificial; icy reserve isn’t an affect that comes naturally to the Takács. (The passage isn’t actually marked non vibrato, but nearly everyone plays it that way.) Still, the off-the-string playing later in the movement and elsewhere had plenty of sinew and bite, and the many glissandos came with a sardonic sting in the tail.

And when the music afforded the opportunity, that Takács depth of tone, suddenly turned on full force, came at you like a physical shock wave. The opening of the “Elegy” is just viola and cello keening in bare octaves, but here the violist and the cellist were Walther and András Fejér, playing fortissimo on their respective C strings, and the effect was overwhelming. Second violinist Károly Schranz was ferocious in the “Humoresque,” playing as though determined to strip his bow of hair, while Dusinberre was at his best in the quicksilver “Étude,” nimble at the opening where the streams of notes are slurred, suddenly brutal where everything turns to separate bows.

It was not a comfortable or a settled performance (I got the impression in places that some interpretive decisions weren’t quite firm yet, and there were little untidinesses of ensemble here and there that are unusual coming from this ensemble). But, then, it’s neither a comfortable nor a settled piece. If this is what the Takács sounds like when adding whole new branches to its repertoire, let’s have more of them, by all means. (Britten, anyone? Hindemith? Milhaud?)

A Familiar Friend

By contrast, Schumann’s A-minor First Quartet is old territory for the Takács. (Indeed, I believe that the ensemble’s early-’80s set of the Schumann quartets for the Hungaroton label — so long out of print that it’s now hard to find traces even of its past existence online — was the first recording of all three of them to make it to CD, at least in this country.) The players wrapped themselves around the music with an air of old intimacy renewed.

Here there was full scope for the Takács’ more-familiar virtues. Schumann’s textures are often knocked (with some justice) as schematic and unidiomatic. These were, after all, his only chamber works not involving the piano; there are places where you can’t help suspecting that the music Schumann heard in his head, so to speak, was for the piano and only clumsily transcribed for the strings, while in others the composer has his players taking turns with a meticulous fairness more formulaic than conversational. But in the Takács’ hands the texture had a rich interior, alive with the minute response of player to player and glowing with darkly burnished tone. The slow movement was a particular triumph — no one could mistake the viola part for a routine pianist’s-left-hand figure once Geraldine Walther had gotten her hands on it — but the bustling scherzo and still-more-bustling finale were brought off with dash and bite and tremendous élan.

I hope that the release next month of the ensemble’s recordings of the A-major Third Quartet and the Piano Quintet presage a companion disc with this work and its F-major other sibling (which the Takács performs here next February). The Schumann quartets have had a spate of popularity recently, though there are still not many ensembles that can play them like this.