Music / Takács Quartet with Angie Milliken. At Llewellyn Hall, August 16. Reviewed by NICK HORN.

The Takács Quartet showed why it is regarded as one of the world’s great string quartets, with consummate performances from its core classical repertoire framing an ambitious new work commissioned by Musica Viva for its 80^th birthday from Australian composer Catherine Milliken.

The Quartet – Edward Dusinberre (violin 1), Harumi Rhodes (violin 2), Richard O’Neill (viola) and András Fejér (cello), the sole remaining foundation member in the Quartet’s 50^th anniversary season –opened the evening with a sparkling rendering of Haydn’s String Quartet in G minor Op. 74, No. 3 The Rider (1793).

The group’s ensemble playing under Dusinberre’s relaxed leadership was impeccable, from the loping rhythm of the 1^st movement to the rich sonorities of the 2^nd, the cheery Menuetto of the 3^rd and the concluding gallop of the final allegro con brio. The expressive body language of the individual members underlined the sublime musical communication that is the hallmark of the genre at its best.

The physical interplay between O’Neill and Rhodes was mesmerising all evening: the violist always moving, miraculously balanced while shifting from a low crouch up to the top of his toes and back again, then generously turning outwards to the audience, while Rhodes, on violin 2, would intently turn between O’Neill and her leader, anticipating the next phrase.

Catherine Milliken composed the Sonnet of an Emigrant for amplified spoken word narrator (Catherine’s sister Angie Milliken) and string quartet, based on poetry of Berthold Brecht written from political exile in Denmark and the US. Milliken distills from these texts an experience of displacement, shifting from loss, nostalgia and desperation (Write to me!; Say your name!) and finally to ambivalent acceptance of change.

Breathless, exquisitely controlled pianissimo passages, seeming to start from deep inside the listener’s head, would evolve into sudden exclamation, entering into dialogue with the narrator.

Angie Milliken delivered Brecht’s words – mostly in English but with some German phrases – quietly and intensely, with restrained affect; perhaps too quietly, as occasionally the sense of the poetry was lost. Overall, the group held the audience captive, creating a sustained and intense dream-like atmosphere.

After the interval, the opening of Beethoven’s C major String Quartet Op. 59 ‘Razumusky’ No. 3 (1808) kept us in thrall with the coiled suspended tonality of its introduction finally resolved by the dancing line of the 1^st violin.

From there it was sheer joy. Fejér’s pizzicato was featured in the 2^nd movement, and Beethoven’s debt to master Haydn was evident in the menuetto. The highlight of the evening came with a glorious final fugue, initiated with a dazzlingly passage on the viola, setting off a race around the group as each member met the challenge to respond in kind, and at pace!

For an encore, the quartet effortlessly shifted style, and we left the concert hall with the pizzicato textures of the 2^nd movement of the Ravel String Quartet dancing in our ears.