Review: Takács Quartet’s all-Beethoven programme a lesson in balance
Unaffected playing gives voice to the stark differences in works from composer’s early, middle and late periods while also emphasising Beethoven’s unifying musical vision
Through four decades of music-making, the Takács Quartet have shown that focusing on the works of a single composer can reveal as much about the players as the music.
The quartet’s initial Bartók cycle in the mid-1980s championed the composer as a fellow Hungarian nationalist. Returning to the same works 15 years later, and with the British-born Edward Dusinberre having replaced founding first violinist Gabor Takács-Nagy, the quartet presented the composer as a well-travelled modernist.
Beethoven, however, is in an entirely different league. For better or worse (and it’s often the latter), musicians use Beethoven as a career benchmark.
Even in a thoroughly saturated recording market, the Takács Quartet’s combination of blistering virtuosity and emotional restraint made their Beethoven cycle – released between 2002 and 2005 – an industry standard. The Takács offered an efficient summary of that approach on Saturday in the Grand Hall of the Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre at the University of Hong Kong.
As with Beethoven’s symphonies, his 16 string quartets cover the composer’s early, middle and late periods in roughly equal proportions. Taken in order, they offer a musical diary of their creator, the quartets as intimate as the symphonies are public.
