The journey through the Beethoven string quartets on which the Takács Quartet has taken its enthralled audiences since last November had to end at some point, and it did so with a standing ovation, as well as the less predictable sense of having come full circle. In their very first recital in the series, the Takács had played the B flat quartet Op 130, with the second, less weighty last movement that Beethoven composed for it; here, they played the same work as originally conceived, with the Grosse Fuge as finale.
The whole balance of Op 130 shifts with such a radical change to its architecture. The Takács's titanic performance of the Grosse Fuge – which still found moments of heart-stopping mystery and quiet playing among the ferocious technical challenges – inevitably became the work's centre of gravity, taking over from the preceding Cavatina, which functions as the emotional core when the lesser finale is played. So here the Cavatina was marginally faster and less weighty than it had been six months ago, and on those fine gradations great quartet-playing such as this is built.
The first half had been taken up with a single work, too: the first of the Razumovskys, Op 59 No 1, which in its own way – 20 years before Grosse Fuge – had broken the conventional bounds of quartet form just as decisively. As the Takács presented it, each movement seemed to push those boundaries ever farther, until in the profoundly sad slow movement, the music seemed to anticipate the world the late quartets would go on to colonise so uniquely.
But then, this enthralling series has contained many revelatory moments such as that. It has been a real privilege to experience string-quartet playing of such selfless intelligence and peerless musicality.
