CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Takács Quartet

Zankel Hall
Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Takács Quartet
·· Edward Dusinberre, Violin
·· Károly Schranz, Violin
·· Geraldine Walther, Viola
·· András Fejér, Cello

HAYDN String Quartet in F Major, Op. 74, No. 2
BARTÓK String Quartet No. 5
BRAHMS String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 51, No. 2

Program Notes:

By Peter Laki

JOSEPH HAYDN String Quartet in F Major, Op. 74, No. 2
Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Austria; died May 31, 1809, in Vienna.

Composed in 1793 and dedicated to Count Georg Apponyi (at whose Viennese residence the first private performance took place), Haydn’s Quartet in C Major was first publicly performed by the Solomon Quartet in 1794 in London.

The music of the late 18th century operates with a rather limited number of formal concepts—sonata, rondo, variation, and a few others—as well as with a finite range of harmonic options. Yet in the hands of Haydn and Mozart, this basic set of devices can be combined to produce an endless variety of results. Music was never closer to being a real language, in the sense of using a shared and readily understandable vocabulary to convey ever-changing original messages.

No one handled this language with more artistic imagination than Franz Joseph Haydn. The F-Major Quartet from Op. 74—a composition from the time of Haydn’s two extended trips to London—exemplifies how each work, built upon similar structural premises, can offer something unique and unrepeatable.

The way Haydn moves the quartet’s opening theme up by a whole step (from F major to G minor) was rather radical in 1793. This kind of motivic transposition is now considered typically Beethovenian, but, as in so many other instances, “Papa Haydn” was well ahead of his time. Leaving the home key so soon and in such an unorthodox way opened the door to many more unusual modulations and a rather wide array of keys used throughout the movement, which also employs some fairly elaborate contrapuntal procedures, with each instrument achieving a high degree of independence.

The second movement is a set of variations on a theme harmonized with extreme delicacy. As the theme is rather extended, there are only three variations: the first featuring the customary figurations, the second—in the minor mode—offering a moment of almost Romantic emotional intensity, followed by a final variation with copious additional embellishments.

The third-movement minuet contains another “Beethovenian” feature in the repeated accents on the upbeat; there are also quite a few new harmonic adventures. Not the least of these is the jump into a rather distant key (D-flat major) in the central Trio section, whose mysterious and irregular melody is played by the second violin in a low register, while the first violin adds ornamental flourishes in a higher octave.

The last movement is a contradanse with a difference: the playful opening melody is developed in rather complex ways. There is also a recurrent theme in longer note-values and harmonically unsettling chromatic notes that introduces a surprisingly dark tone every time it appears. Of course, this doesn’t affect the brilliant happy ending of the quartet.

BÉLA BARTÓK String Quartet No. 5
Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania); died September 26, 1945, in New York City.

Composed in 1934 and dedicated to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5 was first perfomed on April 8, 1935, in Washington, DC, by the Kolisch Quartet. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on March 12, 1964, with the Philadelphia String Quartet: Veda Reynolds and Irwin Eisenberg, violins; Alan Iglitzin, viola; and Charles Brennand, cello.

The string quartets of Béla Bartók have long been recognized among the peaks of 20th-century chamber music. In these six masterworks, Bartók created a classical sense of harmony and balance using entirely new and non-classical means— an achievement to which few of his contemporaries can lay claim. His non-traditional harmonies can sound harsh and dissonant on first hearing, but he used them in such a coherent and logical way that the ear soon accepts them as a natural idiom, organically evolving from the past.

The Fifth String Quartet follows a symmetrical five-movement layout, with a scherzo in the center, framed by two slow movements (nos. 2 and 4) and two fast ones in the extreme positions. This scheme, in which fast and slow tempos alternate regularly, actually results in a seven-fold symmetry, since the central scherzo is itself in an A-B-A form.

The main theme of the first movement grows out of a single note, repeated many times by the four instruments in rhythmic unison. This Allegro follows classical sonata form rather closely, and the contrast among the various themes (the opening ostinato, the angular rhythms of the second theme, and the long legato lines of the third) propels the movement on its path. Bartók’s fondness for mirror symmetries is further expressed in the thematic inversions during the recapitulation: in that section, all the themes return “upside down,” with ascending intervals substituted for descending ones and vice versa.

The second movement is one of Bartók’s so-called “night musics”—a gripping evocation of the mysterious noises of the night as heard by a solitary observer lost in contemplation. A theme of an almost Romantic tenderness, harmonized with conventional triads that sound entirely non-conventional in their 20th-century context, emerges out of the isolated trills of the opening, representing the voice of the lone individual. The tremolos and pizzicatos that soon appear, including pizzicatos played with the nail of the left index finger, create an eerie atmosphere, which is relieved by a return of the pure chords from earlier. True to his concept of symmetry that governs the entire quartet, Bartók returns to the opening trills at the very end.

The third movement is a Scherzo in “Bulgarian rhythm,” that is, in the characteristic mixed meters often found in the folk music of the Balkan nation. The basic pattern of the scherzo is one-two-three-four one-two one-two-three (in a rather fast tempo). Two different melodic motifs are made to fit into the “regular irregularity” of the rhythm: an idea that moves up and down in a chain of thirds, and another one that evokes Hungarian folk music with its melodic outline. The Trio section (which is the center of symmetry for the entire work) brings a particularly striking folk melody played by the viola in its high register, answered by the cello, against the agitated figurations of the first violin. The return of the scherzo is a free recomposition rather than a literal repeat, again involving inversion of the themes.

In many ways, the fourth-movement Andante harks back to the second movement: once more we hear isolated gestures and mysterious noises gradually giving rise to more sustained melodies. But this time, Bartók includes an additional element: a powerful cry in the form of a terse motif of only two notes—an ascending minor third. This motif becomes the basis of a passionate middle section. A few slow pizzicato chords played by the cello serve to bring some calm to the final measures of the movement.

The music of the last movement is driven by rambunctious dance rhythms and playful imitations (as though the instruments were playing catch). The many repeated notes recall the ostinatos of the first movement (another symmetrical touch), but the earlier thematic contrasts have all but disappeared. A startling episode occurs just before the end: a passage marked “Allegretto con indifferenza” where the second violin plays an intentionally banal little melody to the “meccanico” accompaniment of the viola. When the first violin takes over the melody a jarring half-step higher, the joke becomes cruel, and is finally brushed aside by a return of a fast tempo and a mad rush which will last to the end.


JOHANNES BRAHMS String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 51, No. 2Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna.

Composed in 1873, Brahms’s String Quartet in A Minor was first performed on October 18, 1873, in Berlin by the Joachim Quartet. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on December 14, 1929, with the Léner String QuartetL Jenö Léner and Joseph Smilovits, violins; Sandor Roth, viola; and Imre Hartman, cello.

The two string quartets of Op. 51 were the first Brahms deemed worthy of publication (it is said that he destroyed as many as 20 earlier quartets). The opening motif of the A-minor work, however, goes back a full 20 years: it is none other than the F-A-E motto the 20-year-old Brahms had used in a collaborative violin sonata to which he contributed the scherzo, with Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich writing the other movements. The notes F-A-E stood for frei aber einsam (“free but lonely”). Brahms could still identify with those words in 1873, and he was able to develop the potential of this simple three-note motif much more completely than he had been able to do at the beginning of his career.

The first movement of the A-minor quartet is a model of balance and harmony where both themes in the sonata form are gentle and lyrical; the constant interplay of duple and triple meter provides just enough tension to keep the momentum from flagging at any time. The second movement continues the soulful singing, this time in the major mode; it also has a more martial-sounding middle section, after which a variant of the F-A-E motif, played by the cello, leads back to the recapitulation of the initial theme.

That same motif is heard again in the third-movement minuet, whose wistful melody recalls the analogous movement in Brahms’s Cello Sonata in E minor (1865). The movement has a faster trio section in perpetual motion, but, surprisingly, Brahms brings back a short reminiscence of the slow minuet melody in the middle of the trio, before proceeding to the full-fledged recapitulation.

The Finale is a free rondo on a dance melody that plays delightful games with the triple meter. (Incidentally, it begins, after a three-note pick-up, with the notes E-B-C, which is an exact transposition of A-E-F, itself a permutation of F-A-E! The connection may be hard to explain but easy to hear.) There are a few lyrical episodes in the finale, including one in a smaller tempo, transforming the main theme from dance to aria, only to have the idyll disrupted by a breakneck coda, ending the quartet with a lively stretto. (The Italian word for “tight” is used to describe this type of mad rush to the double bar.)

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Peter Laki writes frequently about classical music and is the program annotator of The Cleveland Orchestra.

Takács Quartet
·· Edward Dusinberre, Violin
·· Károly Schranz, Violin
·· Geraldine Walther, Viola
·· András Fejér, Cello
Recognized as one of the world’s premiere string quartets, the Takács Quartet is renowned for the ability to fuse four distinct, expressive musical personalities into gripping, unified interpretations. Based in Boulder at the University of Colorado, the Takács Quartet performs 80 concerts a year worldwide, performing throughout Europe as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Korea. The members of the quartet are Associate Artists at the South Bank Centre in London, performing several concerts there each year. The 2007–08 season highlights include four concerts at Carnegie Hall: “Everyman,” inspired by Philip Roth’s novel of that name, in which they will perform with the Academy Award-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, and a three-concert series focusing on Haydn and Brahms. In North America, they will perform in over 30 cities, and European tours include performances in Vienna, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Frankfurt, and Brussels. In May 2008 the quartet will perform a new piece by James Macmillan, commissioned by the South Bank.

The Quartet’s multi-award winning recordings include the late quartets by Beethoven, which in 2005 won Disc of the Year and Chamber Award from BBC Music Magazine, a Gramophone Award, and a Japanese Record Academy Award. Their recordings of the early and middle Beethoven quartets collected a Grammy, another Gramophone Award, a Chamber Music of America Award, and two further awards from the Japanese Recording Academy.

In 2005 the Takács Quartet signed a contract with Hyperion Records; a disc featuring Brahms’ Piano Quintet with Stephen Hough will be released in November 2007. The Quartet has also made 16 recordings for the Decca label since 1988 of works by Beethoven, Bartok, Borodin, Brahms, Chausson, Dvořák, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Smetana. The ensemble’s recording of the six Bartok string quartets received the 1998 Gramophone Award for chamber music and, in 1999, was nominated for a Grammy.

The quartet is known for innovative programming. The group collaborates regularly with the Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikas, performing a program that explores the folk sources of Bartok’s music. The Takács performed a music and poetry program on a 14-city US tour with the poet Robert Pinsky. This season they will perform the program “Everyman” with actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. Upcoming commissions include works by James Macmillan, Wolfgang Rihm and Daniel Kellogg.

At the University of Colorado, the Takács Quartet has helped to develop a string program with a special emphasis on chamber music. The Quartet’s commitment to teaching is enhanced by summer residencies at the Aspen Festival and at the Music Academy of the West, Santa Barbara. The Takács is a Visiting Quartet at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.

The Takács Quartet was formed in 1975 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest by Gabor Takács-Nagy, Károly Schranz, Gabor Ormai, and András Fejér, while all four were students. It first received international attention in 1977, winning first prize and the Critics’ Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France. The Quartet also won the Gold Medal at the 1978 Portsmouth and Bordeaux Competitions and first prizes at the Budapest International String Quartet Competition in 1978 and the Bratislava Competition in 1981. The Quartet made its North American debut tour in 1982. Violinist Edward Dusinberre joined the Quartet in 1993 and violist Roger Tapping in 1995. Violist Geraldine Walther replaced Mr. Tapping in summer, 2005. Of the original ensemble, Károly Schranz and András Fejér remain. In 2001 the Takács Quartet was awarded the Order of Merit of the Knight’s Cross of the Republic of Merit.