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Review Highlights
SCHUMANN RECORDING REVIEWS: OP. 41 #3 & PIANO QUINTET OP. 44
Hyperion Recording CDA 67631
SCHUMANN String Quartet Op. 41 No. 3, Piano Quintet Op. 44
Takács Quartet, Marc-André Hamelin
THE OBSERVER, LONDON
Schumann's gift for writing piano music or voice didn't so naturally extend to chamber music and he hesitated before venturing into the form.
GRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE
If I could play the piano like Marc-André Hamelin, I'd want to blare out my virtuosity at every opportunity. That Hamelin himself does precisely the opposite is yet again testament to his profound musicianship. He and the Takács Quartet have been touring with Schumann's Piano Quintet and this shows in the deep rapport they demonstrate in this recording of the work. Not that Hamelin isn't centre stage, with the Quartet deployed widely across the stereo spectrum; but the sense is of true chamber interplay between fice equals. Hamelin scampers and thunders by turns but not once does he upstage the string players.
INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW
This Hyperion release celebrates the chamber music composed by Schumann in 1842, the year in which he wrote the three String Quartets, Op. 41, the Piano Quintet, Op. 44 and the Piano Quartet, Op. 47. The Takács Quartet play the third of the String Quartets (in A major) and the Piano Quintet, in which the quartet is joined by Marc-André Hamelin. While Schumann was mot the first composer to write a quintet for piano and strings, his Op. 44 is the earliest to establish itself in the repertoire, with its innovative combination of chamber-music intimacy and symphonic grandeur.
LONDON GUARDIAN: TAKÁCS AT JOHN INNES CENTRE
The focus of the Takács Quartet's current season is Beethoven – a complete cycle of the 17 quartets that they have divided into pairs of programmes, and have spaced out between this month and next May. But any opportunity to see even a part of this exceptional musical event should be seized upon. This is chamber-music playing of overwhelming intensity, insight and intelligence, simply the best I have ever heard in concert.
WASHINGTON POST: TAKÁCS AND MUZSIKÁS
The Takács String Quartet, Muzsikás (an ensemble devoted to the preservation and performance of Hungarian folk music) and singer Márta Sebestyén have teamed up for an alternative approach to understanding Bartók, one that's transparent and a whole lot more fun for the rest of us by posing this question: How have folk traditions influenced the music of this folk-obsessed composer?
CLASSICAL VOICE OF NC: DUKE UNIVERSITY PERFORMANCE
It was a dark and stormy night... The auguries were inauspicious: a night-time football game with two home-teams competing, police cars patrolling and police tape lining the accesses to campus, not one but two other concerts on campus (one on East, and one on West), and to top it off, cold weather and drenching rain. But the full house which attended the presentation by the Takács Quartet in the Chamber Arts Society/Duke Performances series enjoyed an evening of string quartet masterpieces played at the very highest level.
ANN ARBOR NEWS: TAKÁCS AND MARC-ANDRE HAMELIN
A concert by the Takács Quartet — violinists Edward Dusinberre and Karoly Schranz, violist Geraldine Walther and cellist Andras Fejer — is a terrific way to conclude a chamber music season, as the University Musical Society did Friday evening at Rackham Auditorium. But, then again, a concert by the Takács is an equally good a way to commence a season or continue it. The group's playing is so alive, so rich and in the moment, it makes you listen with every fiber.
NY TIMES : ALICE TULLY HALL | BEETHOVEN & BARTOK
Bartok has been a staple of the Takács Quartet’s repertory for decades. The group’s affinity for his music was evident again during a superb evening at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday.
The concert was the first of three in which the ensemble is pairing Bartok’s six String Quartets with Beethoven’s Opus 18 Quartets. The program began with Bartok’s first work in the genre, written when he was experiencing unrequited love for a student at the Budapest Academy of Music.
NY TIMES: ZANKEL HALL | TAKÁCS AND JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET
Lucid investigations of the standard repertory have earned the Takács Quartet a sterling reputation, and a slightly rough-hewn, earthy quality that has emerged in recent performances has made the group even more compelling. The latest reminder came on Saturday night, when it completed a season long survey of Haydn’s Opus 74 quartets and the three string quartets of Brahms at Zankel Hall.
NY TIMES: CARNEGIE HALL | TAKÁCS AND PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN
Philip Roth’s ruminative 2006 novel “Everyman” is the story of a nameless, multi-divorced advertising man in New Jersey grappling with family estrangement, illness and death. When Edward Dusinberre, a violinist from the Takács Quartet, read it, he was struck by what he perceived as its richly musical qualities. In particular three scenes that take place at a run-down cemetery near the New Jersey Turnpike — the “butt end of an airport,” to quote the novel — reminded Mr. Dusinberre of the three sections of a sonata.
FONO FORUM: REVIEW ON BRAHMS RECORDING WITH STEPHEN HOUGH
Oh, how simply magnificent it is, that warm, rich sound at the beginning of the Andante of the A minor Quartet by Brahms! It is miraculous how the four musicians here manage to paint - or rather bow - such a creamy legato, without laying it on even a smidgin too thick. This is romantic espressivo playing at tis very best. Without question, even in this thirty-third year of its existence, and after a few reshuffles, the Hungarian-American Takács Quartet hast lost none of its great qualities - although the recordings the ensemble has made since its move to Hyperion in 2005 have shown a slight tendency towards a rather more economical use of means: the vibrato-rich opulence has given way a little to a more slimlined, transparent tone, but without the four string-players giving up their noble, dark-timbred 'Takács sound.'
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE: REVIEW ON HYPERIONS BRAHMS RECORDING
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.
LONDON GUARDIAN: TAKÁCS AND HAMELIN AT QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL
Pre-empting next year's bicentenary, Schumann has been the featured composer in the Takács Quartet's London appearances this season. Having dispatched the string quartets, they branched out into chamber music with piano for their final concert, joining Marc-André Hamelin for a forthright account of the Piano Quintet.
