Right from the start of this concert it was clear that we were in for more of the kind of superlative music-making we have come almost to take for granted from the Takács Quartet. They began with Haydn’s Quartet in C, Op. 54 No.2, and there was something in the way that all four players seized tenaciously upon the opening chord, then again on the next one, and the next – but each time subtly different. Other groups might have given us short sentences; the Takács gave us a whole paragraph, and the start of a story. None of the music on the programme ever sat still.
Two unconventional, forward-looking classical quartets framed Britten’s No. 2, written in 1945 – which in its final movement nods the other way, back to the baroque era and even earlier. The first movement of the Haydn was ebullient, but it was in the second that the spell-weaving really began, the music quickly reaching a high level of intensity as first violinist Edward Dusinberre traced skittish, rhapsodic lines over the others. The fourth movement continued this rapt atmosphere, now with cellist András Fejér tracing slow arpeggios upwards with almost impossible sweetness.
The players found a new sound for the start of the Britten, drier and almost gauzy, but this filled out to red-blooded warmth by the time the first movement hit its peak point, the two violins and viola soaring above the motor of the cello. In the second movement Britten makes a feature of pairs of instruments playing in unison, handled here with rewarding precision. And in the third, it was the impossibly quiet, grainy trills that grabbed the ear – one of several points when time seemed to be stretched.
That feeling returned in the slow movement Beethoven’s F major Quartet, Op. 135, before a powerful forward momentum returned in the finale, in which the players revelled in the recurring chords – Beethoven’s strange, sonorous klaxons. The Takács play late Beethoven as if they have simultaneously known it all their lives and are coming to it for the first time – which is as it should be, but no less remarkable for that.
• At the Wigmore Hall on 14 November.
