The Takàcs Quartet Newly Configured and Now on Hyperion

Somehow, the Takàcs Quartet has remained artistically stable while contending with many potentially disruptive changes since its founding members, students at Budapest's Franz Liszt Academy, came together in 1975. First, after the group had won several competitions and begun recording for Hungaroton, its members defected from communist Hungary in 1986, having already taken up residence at what then seemed an unlikely spot: the University of Colorado in Boulder. The quartet raised its profile by signing a long-term contract with Decca, for which it would record more than a dozen releases, including Bart6k and Beethoven cycles. But soon it lost its first violinist, the man who gave the group its name; Gàbor Takàcs-Nagy succumbed to the stress of living in a for­eign country without a family, and in 1993, after the fall of the communist government, he returned to Hungary. Takàcs-Nagy was replaced by Edward Dusinberre, a young Englishman with very little professional chamber music experience, but one who meshed well with the other three members. Then, in 1995, violist Gàbor Ormai died rather suddenly of cancer. He was replaced by another Brit, Roger Tapping, and some music-lovers wondered if the quartet would lose its Hungarian identity. The group proved to be resilient, though, and aesthetically consistent. But in 2005, Tapping decid­ed a decade in the quartet was enough. Geraldine Walther, the esteemed longtime principal violist of the San Francisco Symphony, took his place, despite her relative lack of quartet experience. By this time, the quartet had also parted company with Decca.

Now, with Walther having had a full season to settle in, and things once again stable for the entire ensemble, the Takàcs Quartet is about to launch a series of recordings for Hyperion, beginning with a Schubert disc and then moving on to Brahms and Janàcek-averaging one disc a year, into the foreseeable future. With this first Hyperion release, the group is retracing its steps; it already record­ed five Schubert quartets, not to mention the three of Brahms, for Decca. "Yes, but not with me," says first violinist Dusinberre in defense of the group's repertoire duplication. "It was essentially a previ­ous quartet that recorded the Schubert and Brahms. The Brahms choice had a lot to do with the arrival of Gerry as violist, because she's got a wonderfully rich, romantic sound, and she's a wonderful solo player. We thought it would be fun to give her a strong role in these recordings. It was also in our mind that we'd be recording the Brahms Piano Quintet with Stephen Hough, a Hyperion artist, and that the quartets would also be a great project to do." Dusinberre sees nothing wrong with an ensem­ble returning to material it had recorded some years before. "The best recordings get made when the artists are making choices based on their creative growth at the time, and not caring so much about the market conditions, because you get recordings of greater commitment," he says. "There were times when we were pushed to compromise in the past, and we weren't happy with the results."

Dusinberre has been present at almost all of the quartet's major transition points, beginning with his own arrival, and including the two changes of violist, and now the move from Decca to Hyperion. I asked him how each of those events changed the group, musically as well as in terms of interpersonal relationships, if indeed they had any effect at all. "When I joined, it was a huge change for the group. partly at the language level; I didn't speak any Hungarian, and rehearsing in English was very tiring for the Hungarians," he recalls. "I was 24 and still finding my way, and only a year after that, Gdbor was diagnosed with cancer and died very suddenly. That was very traumatic for the group. But we brought Roger in, and while we were thinking about the Hungarian identity and expe­rience of the others very much and got a lot of character from that, we had a lot of new ideas from myself and Roger. For a while, everything was up for grabs and it was very exciting and unnerving, and it took a while to settle down. Recording the Bartók quartets gelled us, and we were able to build everything from that. With Gerry now, there's a lot of common ground in the way we like to com­municate, but it's also different and new and we're working out the best conditions for each person to work in the group, and that's constantly evolving. All the changes made us more and more aware of the complexities in a quartet. One way we avoid conflict and come up with more interesting per­formances is to consider as many ideas as possible. There can be a case where someone may say that a phrase should be more stretched out, and someone else may say what in language sounds like just the opposite, but musically the suggestions are not necessarily contradictory. The opposition in lan­guage may not occur in music."

Dusinberre does allow that the quartet's repertoire has grown a bit thanks to the periodic arrival of new members. "When I joined the group, Bartók was a key thing, Haydn as well; but the quartet had not made much of an impact playing Beethoven. That became much more of an essential part of our work over the past 10 years. Roger helped bring certain things like Janàcek and the Britten Third Quartet to us. We are essentially a very mainstream group. I've tried to encourage us to do more experimental projects, like a program we did with music and poetry a few years ago. A project with a Hungarian folk group was the idea of the second violinist in our group, Kàroly Schranz. I've encouraged us to branch out a little in that direction, but the standard repertoire is so interesting and challenging that it keeps us busy."

Despite the personnel changes, the Takàcs Quartet remains a group with a strong Hungarian musical heritage. "Absolutely, it does," says Dusinberre. "It depends on who you ask, because the Hungarians in the group are likely to downplay that; they say now they are much more fluid than they were before. But my teacher in London, who was a Ukrainian violinist, had a lot of similarities in his approach to music as the Hungarians' teacher, so everything didn't suddenly change when I joined. I feel there's an attitude to their music-making-I can't say that it's just Hungarian-but because they grew up under the communist system, there's a sense of gratitude for what they get to do now, and they think that one shouldn't complain too much about the difficulties that come along. It's incredible: They've been playing together for 31 years, and that's because their individual egos don't conflict and hamper the quartet-playing. Of course, we each have a different personality and we don't suppress that; part of the interest of playing chamber music is getting that balance between the group and the individual."

In two cases-Dusinberre and Walther-the quartet has brought in new members who didn't have a great deal of professional quartet experience. Not a problem either for the individuals or for the quartet, according to Dusinberre. "It's not like we were looking for somebody who didn't have experience," he says. "You look for the person whose playing is the best and who seems the most compatible musically. I had to learn huge amounts, not only repertoire, but discovering how to work in a quartet; you have to articulate your ideas clearly but not aggressively, and you have to take and respond to criticism from others. It's quite demanding personally, the relationships within a quartet. But we enjoy it very much because you're tremendously valued as an individual voice, and people want to hear what you have to say. With Gerry, it's very different from when I joined; her primary work has been in the orchestra, but she has a huge amount of chamber music experience, too. It's just not experience in a quartet; she knows a lot of quintet repertoire, for example. And she has enor­mous performing experience; she's very comfortable on the stage, communicating with people. I love performing, but I had to work out how to do that in a quartet. One of the advantages to bring­ing in people who aren't from other quartets may be that we come to this with a great sense of dis­covery and novelty, and wanting to learn as much as possible, with no preconceptions. If you bring in a player from a quartet with a lot of identity, there are a lot of preconceptions, and it can be dif­ficult to find common ground. We've never had those problems with our transitions."

What about the transition from Decca to Hyperion? "Decca is part of a huge corporation," Dusinberre says. "While we've had people at Decca who were very supportive of us, we've been under pressure to do projects that are financially successful quickly. But you can't make a chamber music CD with the expectation that it will make a huge profit. Over a five- or 10-year period, a CD that is good can do very well; the Bart6k and Beethoven quartets sold very well, and I don't think any record company could be unhappy with that result. But it's unpredictable and requires the long-term or at least medium-term perspective. In big companies, there's a lot of pressure to have short-term success. Another reason we left is having done the Bart6k and Beethoven, we want to have the free­dom to record what we want and not have to fit in with a particular record company executive's ideas, especially when he may not be there in 18 months when the CD is being marketed. To record the Beethoven for Decca, we had to raise close to $100,000 to pay for production expenses. We had a lot of generous donors, for which we're grateful, but we didn't want to have to do that again. Hyperion is ideally set up for chamber music. They're a much smaller company, so they have great flexibility in taking the profits they make from a CD by Stephen Hough, who is one of their most successful and best-selling artists, and plowing that into a chamber-music record of unusual repertoire that they don't expect to make money on. For chamber music, that's the best kind of business model."

Returning to Dusinberre's remark that his ensemble had to raise money for some of the pro­duction costs at Decca, I commented that, while this is common in orchestral recordings, it seemed surprising that a major label like Decca wasn't willing or able to take a relatively small financial risk to support one of the world's most prominent string quartets. "I can understand exactly how this hap­pened," Dusinberre replied. "In the 1980s and early 1990s, Decca had a huge production facility, and everything was done in-house, because they employed many producers and sound engineers and edi­tors. But then they lost a lot of money, partly through miscalculating that when CDs came in every body would replace their record collections with complete cycles on CD. That didn't happen, they lost a lot of money, and new people were appointed to clean things up. During this period, Decca, which had around 40 artists, reduced its roster to 12, of which we were one. While we were plan­ning this Beethoven cycle, they were cutting back drastically, and so we were very lucky to get any kind of contract in that climate. They've turned things around now, and things are looking more pos­itive for them, and they're finding new projects, but we've moved on to Hyperion."

This quartet has a habit of finding a home in small, welcoming places. After all, for more than 20 years it's served as quartet in residence at the University of Colorado, and the group makes a point of sticking around Boulder about half the time through the academic year. "In the last couple of years, we decided we wanted to have the ability to take individual graduate students, not just coach groups, and for that we really need to have steady contact," Dusinberre says. "We enjoy being more connected to the community in that way. The huge advantage to us of living in Boulder is being able to escape in a way. There's a lot of pressure on musicians from the business side of things, and in Boulder, it's easy just to focus on music. We have a nice studio at the university, and our houses are a 10-minute drive from the studio. The two Hungarians play tennis a lot, and we're able to walk in the mountains and find other ways to relax. We try to keep the tours quite compact so we can spend time with our families, as well. The main disadvantage is we have to travel more to get to the east coast or Europe, but it's worth it. And the environment of the college of music is very nurturing for us and for the stu­dents. We get to know them very well, we don't feel stretched too thin, and we enjoy playing with the faculty. The music program has become better and better in the past 10 years. It's hard to recruit stu­dents, because there's a preconception that you need to study in a big metropolitan area. But Indiana University in Bloomington is a good model for us, in which you can have a very high-quality pro­gram outside a major city. It's dangerous if you feel you're too much a part of the establishment. You need to feel you can get outside of things for a while, then come back."

The quartet's educational activities have extended to Aspen and the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, and since last season, its members have been associate artists of the South Bank Center in London, where they conduct outreach programs with young musicians. Obviously, they do not regard teaching and coaching as bothersome distractions from performance. "Selfishly, it's good for us to have smart students who ask interesting questions," says Dusinberre. "It forces us to be challenged in a different dimension. The biggest question in performance is how do you stay in touch with people who are in different stages of life than you're at; classical music requires very specialized training, and it's a challenge to bridge the gulf between what we're focusing on so tech­nically and the audience. Being involved with people at school level and at the university helps make us think about that very carefully. Beyond that, I love opening students' eyes to quartet playing. Not many students come into a music college thinking about playing quartets; they're thinking about working solo or in an orchestra, and those ambitions are great, but you can learn a lot from working with the quartet repertoire, especially because composers are at their most experimental in the quar­tet repertoire. And there's much more to learn about than just music. Playing in a quartet, whether or not you end up doing it professionally, you can learn a lot about life. It's this little unit where you can deal with a lot of the problems you have to face in life generally."

SCHUBERT String Quartets: No. 14, "Death and the Maiden"; No. 13, "Rosamunde" • Takàcs Qrt HYPERION 67585 (69:06)

The Takàcs Quartet makes its Hyperion debut with music it has recorded before, but with only half the present membership, so comparison of this release to the older Decca versions will not be especially meaningful; better to take these performances on their own terms.

The group's approach to each quartet is quite different, but what holds the performances togeth­er is a dedication to inflection without mannerism, and a consistently luminous tone, although the players do know when they should dim the glow.

That would be, for example, at the very beginning of the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet, where the two declamatory opening phrases have an intentionally raw sound. Though never seem­ing rushed, the movement then progresses and develops with intensity, the crisp, biting playing mak­ing the tempo seem even a bit faster than it really is. There's a real sense of urgency here, above all in the coda before the fade-out. In the second movement, the quartet presents the work's namesake song with minimal vibrato; it's stark, but not icy. Through the remainder of the movement, the play­ing benefits from particular warmth in the bottom half of the ensemble. The musicians maintain a firm sense of line all the way through; the movement doesn't fall apart into separate episodes, despite the nicely contrasted character of the playing. The Takàcs Quartet makes the march-like Scherzo about as mordant as a string quartet can be pre-Shostakovich; the final movement holds exactly the same qualities as the first.

The treatment of the "Rosamunde" Quartet is nothing like this; everything is subdued rather than heightened. That doesn't mean it's dull and uninflected; the players put across plenty of detail, but in a dynamically restrained conception that keeps the tension simmering subtly yet disturbingly. The opening is steady and low-key, not giving away too much before the little explosion a minute and a half in; this whole section serves as a dark mirror to the similar but sunnier material that fol­lows. In the second movement, as the players lay out the theme borrowed from Rosamunde, again they perform with restraint, emphasizing the music's melancholy elements rather than its prettiness, without descending to weepiness. The third movement is poised, but intentionally a little nervous­sounding. The Takàcs Quartet's restraint pays off by the time we reach the finale; if the group had milked the melodrama of the first three movements, the fourth would have sounded trivial, but we can relax into the music once the disquiet has eased-mostly. The players read a lot into the rests and the passages that emerge from those little silences. We haven't exactly burst into the light, though; the sense of unease rises again in several spots, without dominating the movement.

This is an exceptional release from an ensemble with no shortage of such things in its catalog. The "new" Takàcs Quartet's Schubert leads us to anticipate very good things from the group's Brahms cycle, which Hyperion will probably release all at once about two years from now.