Takács Quartet

A deeply felt emotional expressivity binds these works from the Classical, Romantic, and 20th-century worlds. In Haydn’s quartet, the second-movement Largo is the work’s poetic soul—a profoundly beautiful meditation. Brahms, too, looks inward in his String Sextet in G Major with a five-note theme whose pitches spell the name of a lost love in an outpouring of uncommon beauty and wistful nostalgia, while Shostakovich mourns a lost friend with gripping music of uncompromising power and somber beauty in his String Quartet No. 11.