United Kingdom Haydn, Britten, and Beethoven: Takács Quartet (Eduard Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes [violins], Richard O’Neill [viola], András Féjer [cello]). Wigmore Hall, London, 12.11.2024. (MB)
Haydn – String Quartet in C major, Op.54 No.2, Hob.III:57
Britten – String Quartet No.2 in C major, Op.36
Beethoven – String Quartet No.16 in F major, Op.135
It is always a joy to hear the Takács Quartet and, in my case, it had been a little while, so was all the more welcome. This Wigmore Hall recital opened with an outstanding performance of the second of Haydn’s ‘Tost’ Quartets, totally ‘inside’ the music from the off, presentation and subsequent development of Haydn’s ideas making that abundantly clear. Surprises duly registered, however often one might have heard them before: not through exaggeration, but through sound musical means, delivered as fresh as the day they were born. Haydn’s invention truly spoke throughout this first movement and beyond, structure becoming form in real time. A gravely beautiful Adagio and its flights of first violin fantasy as brought to life as Eduard Dusinberre cast shadows back into the Baroque and forward to Beethoven and beyond. It led directly into a spirited yet graceful minuet, its trio sternly impassioned as if developing sentiments from the slow movement as well as responding to its sibling. The finale’s formal experimentation again seemed to look forward to Beethoven, late Beethoven at that, its first and third sections elegant and heartfelt, full of harmonic tension and clear of direction. The brief Presto interlude achieved the paradox of skittish rigour, Haydn’s quizzical enigma enhanced.
I have no doubt Britten’s Second Quartet received a performance of similar commitment and excellence, though the work itself pales beside Haydn (and Beethoven), suggesting, as the composer’s instrumental music often does, that words and, in many cases, a stage were necessary if not to ignite then to discipline his compositional imagination. It was certainly a very different tradition from Haydn’s that came to mind in the first two movements, that of relatively recent Russian music: Prokofiev at his more discursive more than Shostakovich, though the latter’s hysterical tendencies exhibited themselves from time to time. The Takács players imbued their performance with character and rigour, and the second movement at least did not outstay its welcome. For all the talk of Purcell – and indeed the overt attempt at homage – the chacony finale seemed lacking in his spirit or much of any other. This performance made as good sense of it as any, but to me it remained grey music, without much in the way of the Peter Grimes-like dramatic leavening of the first movement’s opening.
Where the rot set in was Britten’s notorious verdict on Beethoven. Give me that rot any day, especially in so all-encompassing a performance as that of the Takács Quartet of his final quartet, Op.135. Its opening was inviting, good-humoured, and mysterious in equal measure. That sense of productive, generative balance was typical of the first movement as a whole, imbued with the character as well as the tempo of an Allegretto, ever developing in a reading as spacious as it was intense. It very much felt as if it picked up where Haydn and also the Beethoven of the Eighth Symphony had left off. The ensuing Vivace similarly balanced control and freedom, regularity and the danger of careering out of control. Deeply felt and beautifully sung, the slow movement’s balance between introversion and extroversion was inevitably weighted toward the former, yet outward expression told in the moment, both at micro- and macro-levels. It was played and thus heard as if in a single breath. Following a questing introduction, sad and vehement, seeming both to confront the terrible, tragic truth of existence and yet also to move on, Meistersinger-like, to cope with it in complexity, the finale seemed to hark back to earlier Beethoven, the Razumovsky quartets in particular, yet also to know that it could not merely return. And yet, it persisted. Such, after all, is our lot. If our world is going to end, then let it be here.
Mark Berry