Search - Haydn, Takacs Quartet :: String Quartets 4-6

With his late string quartets, Haydn's mastery of convention had grown to the point that his imagination was utterly unfettered, illustrating Robert Frost's famous dictum that "freedom is working easy in harness." On these recordings dating from 1987 and 1988, the Takacs Quartet, a flamboyant ensemble founded in 1975, plays the six Opus 76 essays in that spirit. Their highly profiled accounts possess exceptional expressive intensity, but are always in good taste. Fittingly, these more public expressions of Haydn's genius have been captured in reverberant spaces--the Schubertsaal of Vienna's Konzerthaus for Nos. 1-3, and St. Barnabas's in London for the final three--in recordings of striking, in-your-face presence. --Ted Libbey