Takács Quartet/Cooper/Mitchell - review

It is not easy to specify which quality, exactly, is responsible for the Takács Quartet's current pre-eminence. I can think of other ensembles with a greater unity of tone, others better disposed to plumb the depths of well-known scores, and still others – though not many – who play with greater energy. And yet every time one is blown away by the rightness and freshness of everything they do. Their feeling for rhythm and gesture, above all, is both so intuitive and thoughtful, that one has the impression of each work as being dreamt, as Wagner's Hans Sachs put it, and composed in the same breath...

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