EIF: Takács Quartet

Queens Hall - 15/08/22

A full hall for a very accomplished quartet.

The Takács Quartet have established themselves as one of the leading string quartets internationally and they were rewarded with a very full Queens Hall for their concert of Haydn, Coleridge-Taylor and Ravel today.  

The Takacs Quartet were founded as a string quartet in Budapest in 1975 by four students, of whom András Fejér (cello) is the only current member. After growing recognition in Europe and North America, the group resettled to the USA, as quartet-in-residence at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where they teach, write and plan their concert cycle to continuing international acclaim. The quartet’s founding first violin, Gábor Takács-Nagy, left the group in 1993, and was replaced by Edward Dusinberre, now a long-established and creative leader. More recent additions are Harumi Rhodes on second violin in 2018 and Richard Yongjae O’Neill on viola in 2020. Each of the four members is a distinguished performer in their own right. As a quartet they must blend together, and despite small reservations expressed in some quarters last year about the settling in of the new combination, today’s evidence on that score is highly positive.

Haydn wrote 68 string quartets, of which none are bad but the Opus 77 No 2 played by the Takács Quartet this morning is particularly melodic. It is beautiful music and took me back on a nostalgic journey to my youth in Harlow, where the Alberni Quartet were based and played regularly. This performance was well received, indeed an enthusiastic audience tried to applaud after the first movement but then settled down to enjoy the music. 

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor who lived from 1875-1912 was an Afro-British composer who became quite famous in his own lifetime, particularly in the USA. Because of his mixed race he became known as “the black Mahler”. More recently his music has been “rediscovered “, owing to our concern to study our black history. Educated at the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition, his music fits very well into the late nineteenth century melodic classical genre. His Five Fantasiestücke for String Quartet, Op. 5, written in 1898, the same year as the first performance of ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’ for which Coleridge-Taylor became world famous. 

The Fantasy Pieces or Fantasiestücke, to use the German name first coined by Schumann, consist of a set of character pieces, each of a different mood and type. The opening Prelude begins in a restless somewhat agitated fashion interplayed with a calmer theme. The Serenade which follows is lyrical with each phrase flowing seamlessly into the next. Next comes a scherzo, Humoresque, which has something of a Bohemian aura. A stately and elegant Minuet serves as the fourth piece. The exciting finale, Dance, is the fifth Stück. Altogether a fine test of the quartet’s concordance. 

After the interval, the audience were treated to the well-known opening melody of Ravel’s String Quartet in F, written in April 1903 and first performed a year later in Paris. It was dedicated to Fauré, but apparently he wasn’t much impressed. Others thought it derivative and too like Debussy’s String Quartet. However the audience liked it then and now, and it got a warm reception from this large Queens Hall audience. 

Cover photo: Andrew Perry