Marvel in Mill Valley

Admirers of the Takács Quartet have had it good these past several years, due to the ensemble's two-concerts-a-season relationship with Cal Performances. The quartet's first Bay Area visit in 2009, though, wasn't to Berkeley's Hertz Hall but to Mill Valley's Mount Tamalpais United Methodist Church. There, Sunday afternoon, Mill Valley Chamber Music Society's loyal subscribers — together with a substantial crowd of new visitors, accommodated via some squeezing on the pews and not a few folding chairs — heard the only Bay Area performance in a miniature tour that otherwise takes the quartet to Oregon and Washington.

The concert (“sponsored in part by a generous gift from Fred and Kathleen Taylor,” two longtime supporters of the MVCMS) was another in the Society's growing series of coups. Another few such successes and I'm not sure how they will manage to accommodate the audience. Any appearance of the Takács is an event, in my book, but this one was especially so in including Bartók's First Quartet. Bartók has been a Takács specialty since the ensemble's founding over 30 years ago, and the ensemble has recorded the six quartets twice — most recently in 1998, by which point current first violinist Edward Dusinberre was in the quartet, but recently joined violist Geraldine Walther was not. I'd imagine that Walther has spent much of her three-plus years in the ensemble becoming as intimate with this music as the other Takács players have long been, work by work. The Cal Performances schedule tells part of the story: We had the Fifth Quartet just over a year ago; both the Second (in February) and the Third (in March) feature in this year's Hertz Hall programs. Sunday's performance of the First, then, represented another snapshot of the “new” Takács on its home turf — a piece of the picture that Bay Area listeners are unlikely to hear again for a year or two.

Amazing Diversity of Sounds

The First is the longest of the Bartók quartets and the sprawliest. Full of arresting ideas, it sees no good reason not to linger on this or that one, nor to resist the impulse to bring one or all back for further dalliance. It's good music, then, for a quartet with the Takács' variety and subtlety of tone colors. The range of sounds was amazing, from eerie nonvibrato to wiry, into-the-string energy, to a kind of billowing airiness, sweet and almost incorporeal, that generally had its origins in a leading viola line. For the first time, indeed, I found myself thinking that there might be too much of that particular good thing. The Takács with Walther in it has always had a sort of internal tension between Walther's, and to an extent Dusinberre's, light, air-filled tone production and the sinewy, denser sounds of the original Hungarian members, second violinist Károly Schranz and cellist András Fejér. The wonder of the quartet was that the differing sounds seemed to work together, so that the players could blend with and balance each other without its ever being unclear who was playing what. On Sunday in the Bartók, the two sound-models seemed to me more plainly at odds. I kept wishing, to be crude about it, for a little more plain sound of bow on string, a bit more physical grit in the playing, from Dusinberre and (especially) from Walther. It wasn't that attacks weren't clean or together; it was more that both players seemed to have a way of sounding the string without doing anything so crass as actually striking it, and both employed it often enough that it began to feel like an affectation. That said, at its best the sound was arresting in the way peculiar to this ensemble: strong and lithe, weighty and transparent, sensuous and yet consistently employed to a purpose. And in this music, there had better always be purpose, otherwise players and the audience both are liable to lose direction in the work's welter of reminiscences and references. Sunday, the Takács players looked back often, but never without knowing the way forward. Haydn's “Emperor” Quartet (Op. 76/3) came before the Bartók on the first half. As Haydn playing, it was a bit frank and hearty for my taste, but then it's difficult to play this piece — with its dotted-rhythm-laden pomp in the first movement and its busy, blustery textures — any other way. (If the Takács players are touring Haydn's quartets in C major — last time it was Op. 74/1 — they've certainly put the loud and “public” ones first. May we hope next time for Op. 20/2, or Op. 54/2, or Op. 64/1?) The Menuetto (all crisp, brusque bow strokes and foot-stomping delayed downbeats) was particularly off-putting, though the gentle, exquisitely voiced variation set before it was another matter.

Aggressively Physical Playing

After intermission came Schumann's First Quartet, Op. 41/1. This found the Takács players in a different mood. The playing was impetuous, restless, edgy. Even when it was quiet and sweet (as in much of the first movement, or the Intermezzo middle section of the Scherzo, or parts of the third-movement Adagio), there was an undercurrent of unsettledness, of irritation. Meanwhile, the fast music — the Scherzo proper and the finale — was not only driven but exaggeratedly physical, bows flying far off the string and slapping back down hard. It was exciting, vivid, quite astonishingly imaginative, and (apart from a few ensemble slips) brilliantly played. It was also, I'd say, on the edge of overkill, in common with every performance of the work I've heard in recent years. This isn't the only way to play the piece, but it does seem to be the going “take” on it, at least since the Zehetmair Quartet's performances and recording several years ago. The knock on Schumann's string quartets was always that they were too formal, too classicized — not organically felt like the piano music, but constructed according to a rulebook extracted from Mendelssohn's Op. 44 quartets. (Mendelssohn was the dedicatee, and his then-recent set of three quartets was Schumann's obvious model.) The modern answer to the charge seems to be to play the music with all the ardor and impetuosity due to the Schumann piano music. In the hands of an ensemble as good as this one, the approach can't help but be interesting. And it surely does make it sound less like Mendelssohn (as he is usually played). Still, that gain comes at the expense of a certain natural husbandry of rhetorical resources. Hearing the Takács players tear through a scale passage in the finale — one that just treads water cycling around the circle of fifths for a few bars — as though their lives depended on getting to the end of it in time, I concluded that even a good idea can be nudged too far. At least, may I hope that the Takács Quartet keeps a little of that fury left over for the next time they take up the Mendelssohn Op. 44s? They could use it.