Review – Brahms String Quintets – Takacs Quartet

While Johannes Brahms almost always deployed classical forms and tonality to express Romantic emotional states and ideas, his attitude towards classicism changed significantly as he aged. A few weeks ago, I played Melnikov’s rendition of the first two piano sonatas for Harmonia Mundi back to back with the recently released Tackas Quartet’s Hyperion recording of the late String Quintets, Ops 88 and 111 (with Lawrence Power on the extra viola) for my son. He offered up a fine metaphor for the change. The young Brahms, he said, is like someone who holds to the letter of a contract but is constantly looking for loopholes.  The old Brahms is someone who respects the spirit of the contract as well as its letter.

That respect for the spirit of classical form and tonality can, I think, sometimes dampen the effectiveness of the late Brahms. The String Quintets, however, are supremely powerful statements of classicism’s continuing expressive possibilities. This is, perhaps, because the Quintet as a musical form in the hands of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert always lent itself to a certain looseness of construction.

The now US-based Tackas Quartet’s performance  is extraordinary , the latest in a set of equally compelling Hyperion discs surveying the Romantic and 20th century chamber music repertoire. The sound is engineered with Hyperion’s typical brilliance and makes the most of the band’s uncanny ability to combine the rubatos characteristic of the great Middle European tradition of string playing with the precision and crispness of tone demanded by current tastes.  Hopefully, the focus on Beethoven, Webern, and Shostakovich in the Tackas Quartet’s 2014 Wigmore Hall concerts is a clue as to what we can expect from them on disc in the not too distant future.