From Newsday, February 2004

The Takács Quartet is renowned for its fiery, probing readings of
mainstream chamber music. Its 1998 recording of the complete Bartók
quartets won a Gramophone Award, and the next year the group took home a Grammy for its CD of Beethoven's middle quartets. It has just released a coruscating set of Beethoven's Opus 18 quartets.

It comes as a surprise, then, that this gold-standard ensemble would
undertake such a taboo-busting program as tonight's Zankel Hall concert,
which violates many of the norms of today's sterile classical programming. The Takács Quartet (violinists Edward Dusinberre and Károly Schranz, violist Roger Tapping and cellist András Fejér) will share the stage with the Hungarian folk band Muzsikás, founded by violinist Mihály Sipos in 1973.

The groups will mix "high" classical compositions with "low" folk music,
intermingling movements of Barták's gnarly, towering fourth quartet (from 1928) with samples of the traditional music on which the composer, a distinguished ethnomusicologist, based his work. The program also will include one of Bartók's recordings of the rural musicians whose artistry he studied.

"We realize we're taking a risk or two, but it's not our intention to be
provocative," said violist Roger Tapping, an affable, common-sense Brit,
speaking by phone from Louisville, Ky., between tour dates. "The deeper
motivation is that there is still some reluctance to listen to Bartók,
because his music sounds very avant-garde to many ears." The collaboration with Muzsikás, he continued, "underpins the way we think about Bartók: the humanity of his work and its deep roots in the actual sounds of folk music."

As an example, Tapping cited "the so-called Bartók pizzicato—when you
pick up the string and snap it against the fingerboard. It's always been
thought of as a very modern idea, but when you hear Muzsikás, you realize that it comes straight from the folk idiom."

Tapping sounded envious as he described Muzsikás' instruments: a
three-stringed viola that serves as a "poor man's accordion or drone" but
also produces "very offbeat, chipped sounds"; the gardon, a cello-like
instrument played percussively ("one beats the living daylights out of it,"
he remarked approvingly), and a kaval, a flute into which the player blows and vocalizes at the same time.

In recent years, the Takács Quartet has performed another unusual program, juxtaposing works for string quartet with verse read by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

Carnegie's Zankel Hall was built in part to showcase such innovative fare. Looking forward to tonight's concert, Carnegie Hall spokeswoman Ann Diebold cited the belief of its late executive and artistic director, Robert Harth, who died Jan. 30 at age 47, that "Carnegie Hall, as the world's stage, should embrace music in its myriad styles."

Muzsikás and the Takács Quartet will be doing their part, bringing together a monument of 20th century classical music and the earthy, living tradition that nourished it.