At 50, the Takacs Quartet Remains as Essential as Ever

ORMAI AND FEJER were teenagers when they decided to form a quartet. In 1973, a year before they entered the fabled Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, they asked Takacs-Nagy to be their first violinist, but they had to content themselves playing trios for the two years it took them to find a second. Takacs-Nagy eventually found Schranz at a soccer match.

Hear Takacs-Nagy and Fejer talk about their education now, and it becomes obvious how lasting its imprint has been. Their teachers — Andras Mihaly, Ferenc Rados and, intriguingly, Gyorgy Kurtag — tried to instill a sense of musical morality in their students. “It was not aimed at chasing mistakes; they were looking for values,” Takacs-Nagy said. “We knew that behind every bar, every note, there are gold mines, diamond fields.”

Fejer recalled that they “thought we knew, if not everything, most things, and these three wonderful teachers made that confident feeling disappear in a matter of hours.”

“That was the last time any one of us thought we knew anything,” he added.

Despite the travel difficulties imposed by life behind the Iron Curtain, the Takacs rose quickly, winning a series of competitions. They studied Bartok with Zoltan Szekely, who had premiered the composer’s Second Violin Concerto and still called his old friend Bela. They also found a mentor in Denes Koromzay, who, like Szekely, had played in the legendary Hungarian String Quartet. In time, Takacs-Nagy said, they became more aware of themselves as part of a distinguished national lineage.

“The Takacs offered all the virtues of Central Europe’s string-playing tradition and only occasionally its defects,” Bernard Holland of The New York Times wrote after hearing them on their first U.S. tour, in 1982. Other quartets might be more precise, he went on, but with the Takacs, “one felt always in the presence of music.”