We’ve grown accustomed to the ensemble face and feel of the lofty fine Takács Quartet around the time of Santa Barbara’s “June gloom” period. Takács, one of the loftier members of the string quartet universe, has held an ongoing spot as the festival-opening act of the summer Music Academy of the West (MAW) season, showing its formidable wares in concert at the Lobero Theatre amid an annual string quartet focus in the MAW calendar.
They have proven to be an ideal party-starter in the Music Academy’s summery world.
Something special this year came, however, when the quartet landed at the Lobero last Friday night amid the milestone-bearing status of its 50th anniversary year. Other quartets have achieved such a status, including last year’s duly toasted Kronos Quartet — the contemporary music championing group we always tend to think of as forever young. The Takács, by contrast, is more of a full-service, style- and era-crossing outfit, at home with the string quartet’s chief architect Haydn — who wisely and logically opened the Lobero program — to music closer to our current age.
Although the quartet’s personnel has shifted through the years since forming as students at the Budapest Music Academy in 1975, cellist András Fejér remains a grounding charter member. The current lineup, with British violinist Edward Dusinberre taking founding member Gábor Takács-Nagy’s first violin spot, also boasts a local angle, once removed. Commanding violist Richard O’Neill, also on faculty at the Music Academy, was a long-standing member of the Santa Barbara–based Camerata Pacifica. Violinist Harumi Rhodes, a solid team player, completes the Takács at present.
Bold individual talents are clearly well-accounted for here. But, true to the mandate of what makes a string quartet especially reliant on empathetic meshing, the Takács operate in impressively taut, four-as-one fashion.
Shifting idiomatic and historical gears nimbly from Haydn’s supple classicism through Czech master Leoš Janáček’s modernist slalom and Beethoven’s dramatic sweep, the quartet projected a fluid mastery of the material. Spaces between notes, a sense of collective breath and virtuosic release, and a general, intuitive feel for structural pace and nuance were hallmarks of the Lobero concert.
Fittingly for the festive spirit of the evening, the reading of Haydn’s Quartet No. 59 “Rider” savored the score’s elegance as well the winking Haydn-esque wit of its false ending. In this case, misplaced, premature applause validated the composer’s intention. Janáček’s Quartet No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata,” a marvel of suspended harmony and emotional content and kinetic motions, both set up the concert finale of Beethoven’s Quartet No. 9 and made a sly cross-reference to Tolstoy’s infamous dislike of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata” for violin. (Tolstoy wrote a novella expressing said disdain.)
As for Beethoven himself, the post-intermission focus on his moving Quartet No. 9 was a varied expressive world unto itself. What opens in a deceptive haze, eases into brooding triple meter and rises into an energetic zeal zone. A friendly barrage of 16th notes, delivered crisply and with dynamic sensitivity by the quartet, builds into a show-stopper of a concert ending.
And thus began the Academy festival, circa 2025, with an auspicious beginning of a rich concert roster to come. The Takács wears its age very well. See musicacademy.org for the complete schedule of events.
