Edward Dusinberre, violin; Károly Schranz, violin; Roger Tappin, viola and András Fejér, cello.

The Takács String Quartet will be offering master classes during the Rocky Ridge 2005 season. Classes will provide an opportunity for string players in the Young Artist Seminar to receive expert critique and instruction.

Recognized as one of the world’s premiere string quartets, the Takács Quartet plays with a virtuosic technique, intense immediacy and consistently burnished tone. The ensemble explores its repertoire with intellectual curiosity and passion, creating performances that are probing, revealing and constantly engaging. The Quartet has been described as having “warmth, exuberance, buoyancy, a teasing subtlety, unanimity of purpose without compromising the individual personalities of each performer, a blossoming tone, and above all the instinct to play from inside the music…” The Takács Quartet is based in Boulder, Colorado, where it has been in residence at the University of Colorado since 1983.

Now entering its thirtieth season, the Takács Quartet has performed repertoire ranging from Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Bartok, Britten, Dutilleux, Janacek and Sheng in virtually every music capital in North America, Europe, Australia and Japan, as well as at prestigious festivals, including Aspen, Berlin, Cheltenham, City of London, Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Salzburg, Schleswig Holstein and Tanglewood. The ensemble is also known for its award-winning recordings on the Decca label, including its 2-CD set of Beethoven’s three “Rasumovsky” String Quartets, Op. 59 and Quartet in E –flat Major, Op. 74, “Harp”, which won the Grammy Award and the Gramophone Award for Best Chamber Performance in 2002. The album is the first installment of the Takács Quartet’s recordings of the complete Beethoven Quartet cycle in three sets, the second of which (the Early Quartets, Op. 19) was released in January 2004. The Quartet’s third and final CD of the late quartets plus Op. 95 and the Grosse Fugue, which completes the cycle, is scheduled for release in 2005. Of their performances and recordings of these Quartets, the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote “The Takács might play this repertoire better than any quartet of the past or present.”

Visit their official quartet website