Wigmore Hall
Brahms – String Quartet no.2 in
A minor, op.51 no.2
Haydn – String Quartet in
B-flat major, op.76 no.4, ‘Sunrise’
Brahms – String Quintet in G
major, op.111
Edward Dusinberre, Károly Schranz (violins)
Geraldine Walther (viola)
András Fejér (cello)
Lawrence Power (viola)
The Takács Quartet, Wigmore
Hall Associate Artists, is this week offering two concerts in which a Brahms
quartet and a Haydn quartet are presented with a Brahms quintet. Friday’s
concert will bring Brahms’s op.51 no.1, Haydn’s op.76 no.5, and Brahms’s Piano
Quintet (with Charles Owen). This concert had the second of Brahms’s quartets,
Haydn’s ‘Sunrise’ Quartet, op.76 no.4, and the G major Quintet, for which the
Takács players were joined by violist Lawrence Power.
Brahms’s A minor Quartet
opened in cultivated fashion, the players offering a flexibility that would
pervade the performance as a whole. This was not the most richly Romantic
Brahms, and there was perhaps a degree of loss in that, but there were gains
too. Certainly that unexaggerated flexibility of tempo in the first movement
and beyond seemed consonant in the best, that is un-slavish, sense with what we
know of Brahms’s own performing practice in his music. A fine balance was
upheld and explored between themes, motifs, and fragments – at times, almost
Webern-like – and the longer line, the overall cumulative effect very much that
of the ‘developing variation’ Schoenberg discerned in Brahms’s music and his
own. Form was properly dynamic in conception and execution. The second movement
was again very well-judged, part-way between Schumannesque intermezzo and
something ‘later’ – always a concern in Brahms. ‘Dramatic’ outbursts made their
point, yet were seamlessly integrated into a greater whole. There was
melancholy, to be sure, but not, as in Nietzsche’s cruel jibe, ‘melancholy of
impotence’, likewise in the third movement, its opening dramatically pregnant,
its later counterpoint handled lightly yet without being underestimated.
Counterpoint was afforded greater weight in the finale, in a reading of
increasing cumulative power, which, tensions beneath the surface
notwithstanding, yet retained a certain Viennese elegance.
Haydn’s ‘Sunrise’ Quartet
sounded from its opening bars, as it should, as though Haydn were very much
part of the same tradition as Brahms and yet in a sense more ‘timely’, less ‘late’,
in his exploratory Classicism. The first movement showed admirable display for
Haydn’s concision and spirit; if I have heard more extrovert performances, this
nevertheless could not help but make me smile. Every note counted, as it must.
Interplay between slow opening material – the apparent ‘introduction’ that is
actually the beginning of the exposition proper – and what follows proved
almost operatic, Mozart not so distant. The slow movement was heard as if in
one, immensely variegated, breath, a model of intelligent and inviting Haydn
playing. Infectious Schwung
characterised the minuet, though its reprise suffered somewhat from imperfect
intonation; the trio offered a delightful sense of partially deconstructed
rusticity. There was again a Mozartian – well, almost Mozartian – poise to the
final movement, but the rigour to the working out was unmistakeably Haydn’s
own, as were the surprises.
Tuning was, rather to my
surprise, a little wayward from the cellist in the opening of Brahms’s G major
String Quintet; that had been rectified the second time around. The performance
as a whole did not quite seem to hit its stride until the second subject, the
opening material sounding slightly forced in its projection. It was a joy
throughout, though, to hear that extra richness afforded by the addition of Power’s
viola; if ever a composer were likely to benefit from such an opportunity, it
was surely Brahms. The flexibility of the opening quartet was once again very
much in evidence, especially dring the development and recapitulation. What one
might call ‘detailed intensity’ came to the fore in the second movement, which
nevertheless retained a sense of overall simplicity, however deceptive, almost
akin to a superior ‘song without words’. The febrile quality to the third
movement seemed just right: unstable and yet ultimately fulfilling, redolent
once again of the worlds of Schoenberg and Webern. However much he might try,
Brahms at his ‘late’ juncture cannot recapture Haydn’s unbounded joy. High, if
mediated, spirits registered all the same in the finale.
