ASPEN — Two pillars of Colorado’s classical-music community — pianist Jeffrey Kahane and the Takács Quartet — teamed up Thursday evening for what could hardly have been a better opening of this year’s edition of the Aspen Music Festival.
The Boulder-based Takács is one of the world’s great quartets, combining unsurpassed technical mastery with a transparent, beautifully integrated sound and a sophisticated, elegant style.
Kahane, better known in Denver as the music director of the Colorado Symphony, is a perfect match with his similarly thoughtful, supremely nuanced playing. There was a sense of genuine dialogue between him and the Takács in the evening’s culminating offering — Cesar Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor, M. 7.
It was an electrifying interpretation of the chamber masterwork, with its big shifts in mood and texture. After a slow, inward-looking introduction, the five musicians brought a palpable intensity and drive to the unrelenting build-up of the Allegro section. Equally compelling moments pervaded the other two movements as well.
The concert opened in an unusual way, with the Takács plunging into a hauntingly introspective slow movement, the first of two sections of a never-completed quartet early in the career of Dmitri Shostakovich. The fragment went unknown and unpublished for a decade after his death in 1975.
Though just eight minutes in length, it is remarkable music and well worth hearing, especially in this ensemble’s sensitive hands. After the first movement, marked by first violinist Edward Dusinberre’s plaintive passages and the handsome barrel-like lower register of cellist András Fejer, came a polka, deconstructed in typical Shostakovich fashion, with a manic, off-kilter feel.
Top-caliber ensembles should be able to make audiences hear familiar works anew, and that is precisely what happened in the Takács’ fresh re-examination of Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in C major, Op. 59, No. 3, “Razumovsky.”
The group highlighted the exotic, quasi-Russian flavor of the extended slow movement, sculpting an interpretation that managed to be simultaneously probing and animated. It brought an almost breathless, kinetic urgency to the intricately interwoven fugato in the final movement.
The Aspen Music Festival will continue through Aug. 17, with more than 350 concerts, master classes and other events.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
