Program Notes
Takács Quartet
Saturday, December 8, 2007, 8:00 p.m.
Southern Theatre

Takács Quartet
Edward Dusinberre, violin
Károly Schranz, violin
Geraldine Walther, viola
András Fejér, cello

About the Artists

Founded in 1975 by four students at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, the Takács Quartet garnered worldwide attention when it won both the First Prize and the Critics’ Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France in 1977.  The next year, it took the Gold Medals at the Portsmouth and Bordeaux competitions and the First Prize at the Budapest International String Quartet Competition.  The Takács was awarded the First Prize in the 1981 Bratislava Competition, and made its North American debut tour in 1982  Since 1983, it has held a Residency at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  It has also held a residency at the Aspen Festival and its members have been Visiting Fellows at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.  Beginning in the 2005-2006 season, the Takács will be Associate Artists of London’s South Bank Centre.  The ensemble’s recording of the six Bartók quartets won the Gramophone “Chamber Music Recording of the Year” award in 1998.  During January 2005, the Takács presented its six-concert traversal of all of the Beethoven string quartets in New York’s Alice Tully Hall, to great acclaim.  The first volume (the “middle quartets”) of the ensemble’s complete Beethoven cycle won the Grammy Award for “Best Chamber Music Album,” the Gramophone “Chamber Music Recording of the Year,” a Grammy nomination for “Best Classical Album,” the Chamber Music America/WQXR Record Award, and the Japan Record Academy Award for Chamber Music, all in 2002.  The Takács Quartet was previously presented under the auspices of Chamber Music Columbus in April 1999, October 2001, and April 2005.

The Takács Quartet appears by arrangement with Seldy Cramer Artists and records for Hyperion and Decca/London Records.  For additional information, the Web site of the Takács Quartet is www.takacsquartet.com.

Joseph Haydn (born Rohrau, Austria, March 31, 1732; died Vienna, May 31, 1809)

Quartet in C major, op. 74, no. 1 (H. III, 72) (composed 1793)
                        Allegro moderato
                        Andantino grazioso
                        Menuetto:  Allegro
                        Finale:  Vivace

Haydn's employer, Prince Nicholas Esterházy, died in 1790, liberating him from the now stultifying atmosphere of the palace at Eisenstadt.  Very soon thereafter, in January 1791, the composer accompanied the impresario Johann Peter Salomon to London for the first of two triumphant visits to England.  A good deal of the period between the two journeys (June 1792 through February 1794) was spent composing works in a more "public" style, intended to be presented at concerts in London during the 1794 season.  Among these compositions were six String Quartets, opp. 71 and 74, known collectively as the Apponyi Quartets, because of their dedication to Count Anton Apponyi, friend and patron of Haydn.  These works were not, strictly speaking, commissioned by Apponyi, who was a violinist of no mean reputation.  Rather, he paid Haydn afterwards for the privilege of exclusive performing rights in Vienna for a year.

Like the London Symphonies (nos. 93-104) of the same period, these quartets are less intimate than their predecessors.  Whereas previous quartets had been written literally as “chamber” music for small audiences in small rooms, the Apponyi Quartets were to be performed in large concert halls and had to command listeners’ attention from the get go.  No subtle opening statements for these pieces.

Haydn begins the Quartet in C major, op. 74, no. 1 with two loud chords, grabbing the audience by their collective ears as if to say “Listen here.”  This is followed by an almost symphonically substantial first theme and by the sonata-stretching development work embedded within the recapitulation.  The Andantino grazioso has the flavor of a dignified formal dance.  The minuet is full of unusual touches that play with traditional rhythms, harmonies, and symmetries.  The key shift in the trio of this movement is particularly distant for Haydn, and its rocking, folksy tune has conjured thoughts of Schubert in more than one commentator.  Even more folk-influenced is the Vivace finale, with another dance-like first theme and a droning bass line in the second.  As in the first movement, there’s some development in the recap.  Papa Haydn may have intended this quartet for a larger than ordinary audience, but perhaps that simply enlarged the humorous sparkle in his eye.

Béla Bartók (born Nagy-szent-miklós, Hungary, March 25, 1881; died New York, September 26, 1945)

Quartet no. 5 (composed 1934)
    Allegro
    Adagio molto
    Scherzo:  Alla bulgarese; Trio
    Andante
    Finale:  Allegro vivace

In a single month (August 6 through September 6, 1934), Béla Bartók fulfilled a commission of the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation with his Fifth String Quartet.  Written quickly, but not carelessly.  Like the Fourth Quartet of 1928, the Fifth is constructed in an “arch” form, where the first and fifth, and the second and fourth movements are closely related, with the central third serving as the keystone.  Everywhere in evidence are Bartók’s skills in development and counterpoint.

Strictly speaking, none of Bartók’s quartets can be said to be “in” a particular key.  Rather, as Halsey Stevens has put it, they are “on” a tonality, in this case, B-flat:  “By this it is understood that these key-notes serve as orientation points:  that the music is organized around them, modally or chromatically, freely fluctuating, using the key-notes as points of departure and points of repose, affecting modulation from and back to them.”

By the insistent repetition of B-flat in the opening bars, Bartók establishes the tonal center.  From there, the viola and cello state the violent first theme.  A fugitive passage, which never recurs, leads to a pulsing transitional theme derived from the first.  All three aspects of that first theme frolic in the development, after which the recap reverses the order of the exposition and inverts the themes.

The second and fourth movements are almost identically structured.  Both begin uncertainly, the second with fragments and trills in the violin, the fourth with pizzicato glissandi.  Passages of Bartókian “night music” constitute the midsections of both.  In the second movement, the return of the opening section is shortened and in the fourth, disguised until the very end.

Between these are the syncopated Bulgarian rhythms of the Scherzo; the muted violin ostinato and the viola’s folk tune mark the trio.  With an introduction related to the coda of the opening movement, the finale uses that movement as its touchstone.  Its theme is a free inversion of the first movement’s and, like that movement, it reverses thematic order in the recap.  Full of madcap contrapuntal effects, the finale is suddenly interrupted by a comically out-of-tune little polka, “Allegro con indifferenza,” before the quartet redoubles its efforts to the end.

Johannes Brahms (born Hamburg, May 7, 1833; died Vienna, April 3, 1897)

Quartet in C minor, op. 51, no. 1 (composed 1865-1873)
    Allegro
    Romanze:  Poco adagio
    Allegretto molto moderato e comodo
    Allegro

Beethoven’s shadow hovered over him so oppressively that as many as twenty string quartets were written and destroyed before Brahms allowed the pair we know as Opus 51 to be published in 1873.  By some accounts, he’d already spent as many as twenty years working on this Quartet in C minor.  But we know for sure that his friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim had inquired about Brahms’s progress on the work in 1865, and that in 1869, Brahms sent Clara Schumann the first and final movements for her comments.

In the autumn of 1872, Brahms had reluctantly accepted the artistic directorship of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna.  Accustomed to devoting springs and summers to his own composition, he had found this burden to be interfering with his creative energies, so by 1875, he had resigned the post.  During his summer 1873 retreat in Tutzing on the Starnberger See in Upper Bavaria, however, he finally completed the two Minor Quartets, dedicated to a Viennese surgeon and violinist, Theodore Billroth.  In December, the Hellmesberger Quartet performed the premiere of Op. 51, no. 1, in Vienna.

A tumultuous rising phrase with dotted rhythms followed by a more gentle falling phrase constitutes the opening theme and affords a foretaste of the finale.  The violins play a second theme over a lightning viola motif.  The second movement Romanze recalls the first movement’s main theme, but now in A-flat major and more intimate than grand.  A second even more meditative B section is followed by the opening’s return and a coda that revisits both themes.

The first violin and viola vie for supremacy in the contrapuntal scherzo.  The trio (Un poco più animato) is a contrasting waltz.  Listen for the second violin’s little trick called “bariolage,” where the same note sounds on two strings, creating a special sort of tremolo.  The first movement’s main theme returns, after a fashion, as the spirited signature of the Allegro finale.  A passionate second subject and a more laid-back third in the second violin follow.  All three return for the involved coda.

--Program notes by Jay Weitz, Senior Consulting Database Specialist for music, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio.  He is a contributing performing arts critic for the weekly alternative newspaper Columbus Alive (http://www.columbusalive.com)

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