Review on Brahms Recording with Stephen Hough

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

By Calum MacDonald

This disc is an excellent follow-up to the Takács's version of Brahms's A minor Quartet and Piano Quintet (with Stephen Hough). Here again their approach is alert, texturally clear and passionate, finding an earthiness and rusticity in the B flat Quartet and conveying the febrile, tempestuous nature of the C minor while bringing out the music's innate toughness of fibre. Their range of tone-colour is graphically displayed in the B flat's variation finale and the veiled sonorities of its Agitato third movement and the tonal subteties of the C minor's two inner movements. The rhythmic and polyphonic interplay of that work's complex first movement is also magnificently brought out, as is the fateful atmosphere of the finale.

These are, therefore, admirable performances, which I recommend to any prospective buyer. But the competition is nonetheless very keen. O still think the Emerson Quartet are to be preferred because of the sheer gemütlichkeit they bring to so much of the B flat Quartet and the haunted quality of their account of the C minor. In their 1994 Teldec release the Borodin Quartet are also first-rate in these two works, as are the Alban Berg Quartet on EMI. But this new Takács reading ways in at the top end of the many available versions.

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