It is something of a coup for the South Bank Centre to have recruited the Takács Quartet as associate artists, to succeed the Alban Berg Quartet (now promoted to the status of "Quartet Laureate"). Where the ABQ's playing is marked by a control and refinement that can give the—usually misleading—impression that its players are more concerned to polish the surface of music than to explore its depths, the Takács, while certainly not lacking in control or refinement, play with a directness that leaves no doubt of its musical and emotional command of the repertoire. Founded in 1975 by four members of the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, the Hungarian quartet became Anglo-Hungarian during the mid-1990s when Englishmen Edward Dusinberre and Roger Tapping took over as first violin and viola player respectively. Having completed their extraordinarily fine cycle of the Beethoven quartets for Decca, Takács has now signed up with Hyperion, so joining the distinguished ranks of those who are no longer recording for the labels that have been bought up by Universal.
The Takács gave its first concert in post at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in November, and this provided London with a first chance to hear Geraldine Walther, who replaced Tapping as viola player last summer. Walther had been principal violist of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for 30 years. It was a great relief to find that the character of the quartet was unchanged. Walther's playing was both characterful and responsive—and crucially, she has the ability—like her new colleagues—to let the music breathe. Hers is a fine appointment.
The quartet returned to the QEH in January to join forces with the Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikás and the singer Márta Sebestyén. This fascinating programme set the quartets of Bartók against some of the rural folk music that was such an influence on him. It is well enough known that Bartók borrowed from rural Hungarian traditions, and that he was a pioneer in investigating and recording the music of the Hungarian peasantry (as opposed to the popular gypsy music of the towns and cities). For most of us, however, this knowledge is pretty abstract, and to hear this strange music, with its raw textures and microtonal dissonance, and to listen to Bartók in its context, was revelatory, showing both how profound was his debt to it and how wonderfully he transformed it. For, exciting and sometimes moving as the folk musicians' performances were, what emerged as clearly as anything was the emotional importance of artifice. In the first half of the concert, the Takács played the 4th quartet with folk pieces between the movements. After the second movement, Sebestyén sang an unaccompanied song, wistful and poignant, whose line was echoed by the cello in the next movement of the quartet—but because the cello solo was so much more carefully shaped, the effect was even more haunting and powerful. It was hardly surprising that Bartók's music would have formal qualities lacked by the folk music, but it was perhaps less to be expected that because of this it would be more immediately affecting.
An interminable Leningrad
Much less affecting was the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's performance of Shostakovich's Leningrad symphony under Mariss Jansons at the Barbican in late January. This was not the musicians' fault—it would be difficult to imagine a more committed or sympathetic performance—but the piece still seemed interminable. Can there be a more desultory musical debate than that over whether the "invasion" section of the symphony's first movement is supposed to depict the German forces who were invading Russia in 1941, or whether it represents the more general and long-term invasion of Russia by totalitarian repression? This would only have any point if the passage were musically more interesting. It consists of a theme of what Andrew Huth has called "appalling and deliberate banality" repeated over and again through a gradual but very long crescendo, and for this reason has sometimes been compared to Ravel's Bolero—but it manifests none of the brilliance of orchestration that just about makes that piece bearable. I have heard it said that the music captures the relentlessness of war precisely because it is so boring—but this is like saying that a novel that explores the boringness of everyday life should itself be boring, which manifests a very flat-footed approach to aesthetics.
There are some nice, even affecting moments in the symphony, especially in the middle movements, but this makes it all the more frustrating that Shostakovich seemed unable to place them within musical structures that would make them satisfying. Could it be that having been forced back from the avant-garde by the forces of Soviet reaction, Shostakovich's heart wasn't really in developing the kind of tonal argument needed to produce something genuinely symphonic? Part of his appeal to modern audiences is the fact that we can sympathise with him as an aesthetic victim of totalitarianism, an artist forced to bend his creative will to the philistine demands of the Soviet regime. It is perhaps ironic that those who respond so enthusiastically to such works as the Leningrad should have reason to be grateful to that system for making Shostakovich write in an idiom that is so easily comprehensible, if for that reason, ultimately unsatisfying.
