For any string quartet, performances of the late Beethoven quartets represents the summit of their craft, a challenge to stretch their intellectual and musical powers to their limits. Just as Beethoven's symphonies redefined the form and set its development on an utterly new track that continued right through the 19th century, so his string quartets, and the series of late works that began with the E flat Quartet, Op 127, in particular, set a new standard for the musical significance of the medium - and put in train a line of development which is carried on even today in the quartets of Elliott Carter and Brian Ferneyhough.
Those five quartets - six if you regard the Grosse Fuge, originally intended as the finale of the B flat, Op 130, as an independent work - come with a huge amount of musical and historical baggage, therefore, all of which just increases the weight of expectation placed upon any interpretation. The performing tradition of these works, first in the concert hall and in the second half of the 20th century on disc too, is probably more sanctified than that of any other repertoire: record collectors may talk with reverence about Furtwängler's recording of Tristan, Toscanini's Falstaff or Klemperer's Eroica Symphony, but a special awe is reserved for discussions of the Busch Quartet's late Beethoven, or even the recordings of a generation later by the Budapest and Hungarian Quartets.
Though most of those performances are more than half a century old now, they remain the standards against which any new set of these works is bound to be judged, and it is saying a great deal about the sheer understanding and accomplishment of these recordings by the Takács Quartet that they are the first to arrive for a long time to deserve such comparisons. Alongside these interpretations most other contemporary accounts are simply nowhere; the Takács make the competition seem either slick and meretricious, or insecure and over-emphatic. These are performances that have quite clearly been maturing for a long time, so that every detail (one or two of them unexpected - the Takács play from a new edition of the works) is placed in its natural context, the phrasing, using just a trace of a slide between some notes, is utterly organic and the ensemble at times almost subliminally precise.
There are one or two trifling complaints to be made about the set, however. It is very well-filled - the F minor Quartet Op 95 is included as well as the genuinely late works (presumably because no room could be found for it in the two previous instalments of the Takács cycle, which covered the Op 18 works, and the Rasumovskys and Op 74 respectively) and both of Beethoven's finales for Op 130 are there, with the Grosse Fuge placed on the disc before its replacement. But accommodating that amount of music on just three discs means that the order of the works is not chronological - the first disc contains the E flat Op 127 and the C sharp minor Op 131, the second the A minor Op 132, and the very last in F major Op 135, with Op 130 prefaced by Op 95 on the last. Anyone who wants to hear just a single work won't be bothered by such an arrangement, but those who would like to follow the extraordinary evolution of Beethoven's formal thinking in these late works - from the classical four movements of Op 127, through the proliferation of movements in 130, 131 and 132, with a return to the classical plan in Op 135 will have a bit of disc swapping and track-finding to do.
With performances as superb as these, though, it is a minor inconvenience. There are so many things to treasure in every work, details that it is hard to imagine better done, whether it's the perfectly controlled sense of release in the first movement of Op 127, the utterly certain progress of the fugue that opens 131 and the bewitchingly deft account of the little Presto later in the same work, the gradually increasing radiance of the thanksgiving hymn in 132, or the way in which the infinitely touching account of the Cavatina in 130, never sentimental and followed by the Grosse Fuge which never even momentarily sounds under strain.
This is an exceptional achievement. For anyone who does not possess versions of these works it is now the obvious recommendation (the sound is wonderfully lifelike and unobtrusively detailed too), and even those who remain passionate about the performances by the Busch Quartet or some other iconic recordings will find them fascinating and satisfying.
