Takacs Quartet at the Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

From the opening few notes of Haydn's Emperor Quartet, the Takacs Quartet assured us we were in for an evening of exceptional musical calibre.

Violist Roger Tapping had already promised me they would deliver a grand sound. They did that and more, especially in unbridled E major rusticity of Haydn's first movement.

Yet all was not bucolic. Few can phrase with such refinement as these four musicians, or gauge the weight of a chord with such unerring taste - all this and a real feeling for the dialogue that is at the heart of this music.

The well-known slow movement came up with sonorous harmonies and spruce musical conversations in its variations. After a self-possessed Minuet, the Finale, much spurred on by the deft Edward Dusinberre, was a study in agility.

The same tang of the Earth was in Bartok's Fourth Quartet. The clustering tangle of dissonances in the opening Allegro inspired all instruments to pursue various alliances as the movement progressed.

The central movement was dominated by Andras Fejer's poignant cello solo and was framed by swooning glissandi in the previous movement and the resonant pizzicati in the fourth. By the Finale, the sound was at its most electrifying and the ensemble unflinching in its energy.

Mendelssohn's A minor Quartet Opus 13 was the revelation of the evening. This is an extraordinary score to have come from an 18-year old. Immersed in the world of late Beethoven, the young Mendelssohn responded to the older composer's radical techniques through his uniquely Jewish sensibility.

With Takacs, beauty of sound was paramount, positively opalescent when cello and viola came out of the texture.

Dusinberre's elegant tone, eschewing any sentimentality, soared above lustrous chords. Where lesser players would simply have delivered blocks of harmony, these musicians revealed the individual lines that lay beneath and within the chordal structure.

Our emotions drained, and satisfyingly so, it was time for an encore and it would be "something less angst-ridden", leader Dusinberre announced.

It was just that - the joyous Finale from Dvorak's American Quartet, played by Takacs with the verve and thrust of an ensemble twice its size.