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 Edward Dusinberre, violin
Károly Schranz, violin
Geraldine Walther, viola
András Fejér, cello
Recognized as one of the world’s premiere string quartets, the Takács Quartet plays with a virtuosic technique, intense immediacy and consistently burnished tone. The ensemble explores its repertoire with intellectual curiosity and passion, creating performances that are probing, revealing and constantly engaging. Called “one of the great ensembles of our age” by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Quartet has been described as having “warmth, exuberance, buoyancy, a teasing subtlety, unanimity of purpose without compromising the individual personalities of each performer, a blossoming tone, and above all the instinct to play from inside the music…” The Takács Quartet is based in Boulder, Colorado, where it has been in residence at the University of Colorado since 1983. Its members were also recently named Associate Artists of the South Bank Center in London.
Now entering its thirty-first season, the Takács Quartet has performed repertoire ranging from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Bartók, Britten, Dutilleux, Janacek and Sheng in virtually every music capital in North America, Europe, Australasia and Japan, as well as at prestigious festivals, including Aspen, Berlin, Cheltenham, City of London, Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Salzburg, Schleswig Holstein and Tanglewood. The ensemble has garnered particular acclaim over the past several seasons for its performances and recordings of the Beethoven String Quartets. The Takács Quartet has recorded the complete Beethoven Quartet cycle in three sets on the Decca label, the first of which (Beethoven’s three “Razumovsky” String Quartets, Op. 59 and Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 74, “Harp”) won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Performance in 2002. The second album in the cycle (the Early Quartets, Op. 18) was released in January 2004, and won the 2004 Japan Record Academy Chamber Music Award, and their third and final CD of the late quartets plus Op. 95 and the Grosse Fugue, released in January 2005 was described as a “wonderfully humane and probing set, [which] puts the seal on a complete cycle that promises to set a standard for such efforts through the coming decades” by the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Quartet has given highly acclaimed performances of the complete Beethoven cycle in New York (Lincoln Center), Cleveland, London, Los Angeles, Paris and Sydney. Following their Lincoln Center performances the New York Observer wrote that the Takács Quartet “brought Beethoven …more vividly to life than has happened during any other playing of the quartets that I can recall.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer has written “the Takács might play this repertoire better than any quartet of the past or present.” Other notable Takács Quartet appearances worldwide have included performances of the Bartók cycle in Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Pittsburgh, Tucson, London, Madrid, Seville, Valencia, New York, and Tokyo; the Brahms cycle in London; the Schubert cycle in London, Lisbon and cities in Italy, the Netherlands and Spain; concerts in Japan; the world premiere performance of Bright Sheng’s Quartet No. 3; the world premiere of Su Lian Tan’s Life in Wayang; a fourteen-city U.S. tour with the thirty-ninth Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky; and a collaboration with the Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikás in a series of joint concerts exploring the connections between traditional Hungarian folk melodies and the works of Bartók and Kodály.
Highlights of the Takács Quartet’s 2005-2006 season include a three concert series focusing on Mozart at Carnegie Hall with clarinetist Richard Stoltzman and violist James Dunham, three concerts at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall; performances of the Brahms Piano Quintet in Baltimore, Berkeley, Dartmouth University, Duke University, La Jolla, Pittsburgh and Santa Fe with pianist Garrick Ohlsson; the continuation of their complete Beethoven cycle at UC Berkeley, and more than 50 other appearances world-wide, including a return tour to Japan, and concerts in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Avignon, Bilbao, Boston, Chicago, Cologne, Dallas, Geneva, Los Angeles, Paris, Philadelphia, Rotterdam, Toronto, and Zurich.
The Takács Quartet has made sixteen recordings for the Decca label of works by Beethoven, Bartók, Borodin, Brahms, Chausson, Dvorak, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Smetana. The ensemble’s recording of the six Bartók String Quartets received the 1998 Gramophone Award for chamber music and, in 1999, was nominated for a Grammy. In addition to the Beethoven String Quartet cycle recording, the ensemble’s other Decca recordings include Dvorak’s String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 51 and Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81 with pianist Andreas Haefliger; Schubert’s Trout Quintet with Mr. Haefliger, which was nominated in 2000 for a Grammy Award; string quartets by Smetana and Borodin; Schubert’s Quartet in G Major and Notturno Piano Trio with Mr. Haefliger; the three Brahms string quartets and Piano Quintet in F Minor with pianist András Schiff; Chausson’s Concerto for violin, piano and string quartet with violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet; and Mozart’s String Quintets, K515 and 516 with Gyorgy Pauk, viola.
The Takács Quartet was formed in 1975 at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest by Gabor Takács-Nagy, Károly Schranz, Gabor Ormai and András Fejér, while all four were students. It first received international attention in 1977, winning First Prize and the Critics’ Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Evian, France. The Quartet has also won the Gold Medal at the 1978 Portsmouth and Bordeaux Competitions and First Prizes at the Budapest International String Quartet Competition in 1978 and the Bratislava Competition in 1981. The Quartet made its North American debut tour in 1982. Violinist Edward Dusinberre joined the Quartet in 1993 and violist Roger Tapping in 1995. Geraldine Walther joins the Quartet in summer 2005, replacing Mr. Tapping. Of the original ensemble, violinist Károly Schranz and cellist András Fejér remain. In addition to its residency at the University of Colorado, the ensemble is also a Visiting Quartet at the Aspen Music Festival and School and at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara; its members are Visiting Fellows at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and, beginning with the 2005-2006 season, will become Associate Artists of the South Bank Center in London. In 2001, The Takács Quartet was awarded the Order of Merit of the Knight’s Cross of the Republic of Hungary.
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