The College will get the chance to understand the hype when the Grammy Award-winning string ensemble performs tonight at 7 p.m. on the Spaulding Auditorium stage at the Hopkins Center. They will be performing Claude Debussy's string quartet, Leos Janacek's String Quartet No. 1 and Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C minor.
The Takacs (pronounced TOK-atsch) Quartet was formed in 1975 by four classmates at the Franz Liszt Music Academy in Budapest, Hungary, according to the Hopkins Center program notes.
"We started the quartet when we were 19," cellist and founding member Andras Fejer said. "Chamber music was a compulsory subject, but we wanted to take it more seriously, something that we would do for the future."
International recognition followed soon after, when the group won the first prize and critics' prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France, according to the program notes. Since then, the quartet has become one of the most world-renowned string ensembles, receiving numerous prestigious awards including a Grammy, a Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award and two Gramophones, the Oscar Award of classical music, according to Fejer. Over three decades, the group has recorded Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Bartok and Beethoven to critical acclaim.
Consisting of two of the original members, English violinist Edward Dusinberre and Florida-born violist Geraldine Walther, the quartet performs 90 concerts a year in famous venues all over the globe. This weekend, for example, the ensemble will be performing in New York's Carnegie Hall. This year, the group will be traveling to perform across the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, according to Fejer. Traveling can be difficult, but the group is motivated by the members' love for music, he said.
"Since we are so focused on the intensity of the work, somehow some our body sense mechanism works it out," he said. "It's wonderful, otherwise we would have stopped."
The quartet currently resides in Boulder, Colo., where the members are Christoffersen Faculty Fellows at the University of Colorado, Boulder, he said.
Fejer said he has been playing the cello since the age of seven.
"My father was a cellist," he said. "He was unwilling to listen to a beginner's violin player."
Fejer has been playing with the quartet for the 36 years since the group's founding, he said. He emphasized that the group's interpretation of the music is a collaborative process that accounts for four distinct musicians.
"We dissect every little part of the piece, talk about the color, the orchestration for every bar, every note," Fejer said. "When we put it together again, we argue, we set up things, and if one of us doesn't agree on the solution for one concert, we play one interpretation and then another. It's all a living work, that's why it's exciting. There is no such thing as only one possible solution."
The Takacs Quartet particularly enjoys performing at universities in addition to concert halls, Fejer said.
"We actually really adore, really adore playing at universities because the audience is extremely educated," Fejer said. "[Students] are very sensitive, very capable of taking in the passion and depth of the music. We love universities. It's always a very energetic vibe coming from the audience."
The performance on Spaulding stage will be all the more exciting because the repertoire includes Beethoven's monumental 14th String Quartet, composed when Beethoven was deaf and plagued by life-threatening illness. Upon hearing the quartet in C minor, Schubert is said to have remarked, "After this, what is left for us to write?"
"It's a unique quartet in the sense that it consists of secen movements, played nonstop in one big 40-minute piece," he said. "We are traveling through the light-footed, through the romantic, through the intimate, through over-the-top chattery, through dance music, finally reaching a culminating climax."
When it first premiered, the quartet was met with mixed reviews because of its unorthodox harmony, impressionistic tonal shifts and cyclic structure, according to the program notes. Since then, however, the quartet is considered to have revolutionized string quartet music by freeing chamber music of its rigidity. Despite raving critics, Fejer himself is modest about the Takacs Quartet's critical acclaim.
"The group is 36 years old, so we've been practicing, rehearsing and traveling for a long time," he said. "It's nice to see that what we've worked on gets the approval of the audience and the critics."
The Guardian, however, is a bit more complimentary than Fejer: "There's simply no other quartet around today that comes within touching distance of the Takacs."
