Takács Quartet
Garrick Ohlsson (piano)
9 October 2005 - Zellerbach Hall, University of California at Berkeley
Over the summer, shortly before violist Geraldine
Walther joined the famous Takács Quartet, someone told her it would take five years for the newly configured group to reach its next peak. "I don't have five years," Walther, 55, told a friend. "We're going to sound good in five weeks!"
Of course, a fine string quartet, like a fine wine, takes years to reach its full balance and blend — and the Takács, naturally, will keep evolving with Walther, its newest member. Still, there's no getting around how good the group sounded Sunday afternoon at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, where Walther made her local debut with the Takács.
It was a big gig for her.
For 29 years, Walther was principal violist of the San Francisco Symphony, so this event, sponsored by Cal Performances, was her coming-out party. Before a nearly sold-out house, she was showing off her new career, her full-time entry into the chamber music world.
The right choice
At a more basic level, she was proving that the world-famous Takács — founded 30 years ago in Budapest, Hungary, and in residence since 1983 at the University of Colorado-Boulder — had made the right decision in choosing her to replace its longtime violist, Roger Tapping.
Did it ever. With less than a month's worth of performances under her belt, Walther — with her warm, honeyed tone, her clarity and confidence — is already a fit with the group, which sounded remarkably, delicately in balance.
You could hear it in the first movement of the first piece on the program, Mozart's String Quartet No. 19 in C major, K. 465, nicknamed the "Dissonance" Quartet. The slow, opening bars — which contain a variety of expressive dissonances, including an A rubbing against an A-flat in the very first chord — were exquisite. The four voices moved in and around one another like super-sensitized counterweights; it was a sort of ballet.
And it continued like that: interweaving threads of melody and countermelody, falling between and through one another. After the first bars, the piece is anything but "dissonant." In fact, it is filled with felicity — life's consonances, portrayed here by the four sonorous voices of this quartet. Its members play on very fine instruments, owned by the Takács; Walther's viola, an 18th-century Guadagnini, on which she has been playing for only a short time, has a big, dark sound that really lets her sing.
In the slow second movement, the group was aglow. This reverie, with Walther providing a low-thrumming pulse, faded away to a wisp of sound, then, nothing. The third movement was heartier, an awakening. The fourth offered a touch of turbulence, with clear, ricocheting runs from Edward Dusinberre, the first violinist. But it was a delicate turbulence, never loud; Takács made the audience acclimate by stretching its ears to what seemed like thousands of soft nuances.
Debussy's castle
The second piece on the program, Debussy's String Quartet in G minor, was even better. It begins with an ancient-sounding motto — a modal melody, clothed in Debussy's distinctive harmonies — that stretches and transforms throughout the work's four movements as the composer builds his castle in the air.
There was an incredible airiness to Sunday's performance, with its refined, tremulous atmospherics: It evoked sunlight passing through fog. You could "see" each refracted ray.
In the second movement, Walther played an ostinato, a low repeating figure, as her bandmates swirled around her with plucked-and-snapped string effects. Eventually, all four players were "pizzing," sparklingly, with cut-glass precision.
By the end of the piece, Debussy seemed to be speaking — in a murmur, from far, far away — through these four wonderfully in-sync players.
The program's second half was supposed to move things to a new climax as pianist Garrick Ohlsson joined the group for Brahms's epic Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34. It was a fine performance — robust, touching on Beethoven's heroism and Schubert's heart, and jammed with Brahms's superabundance of melodies and ideas.
But adding a fifth player broke the afternoon's spell. Ohlsson wasn't liquid enough and the Takács seemed a little weepy. For all the performance's energy, it never achieved the intuitive in-syncness of the concert's first half. The balance wasn't quite there. The ballet had ended.
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