With the green lanes of Sussex foaming with cow parsley and blackthorn blossom, and afternoon programme of youthful exuberance, was entirely appropriate, with occasional diversions into the mellow fruitfulness that more reflected the Glyndebourne audience and the Takács themselves - at it since 1975.
Anton Webern is more often associated with unrelenting abstract serialism, but here we heard his early piece, Langsamer Satz, the sound of the young composer trying out his new voice and choosing the path of romanticism.
The Takacs gave lyrical vent to Webern’s melodic yearnings and committed themselves fully to the climactic intensity as befits a young Austrian hiking in the Alps and falling in love with his cousin, while the light-fingered mystery of the pizzicato passages gave a hint as to what was to follow.
And follow it did. After a vigorous account of Dvorak’s quartet in A major Op 105 – if you ever want to imagine you are bowling along through the forest in a pony trap, this is the piece for you - the quartet’s much hoped-for encore was a return to their Hungarian roots, in Bartok’s Allegretto Pizzicato, making the most of the surprisingly intimate acoustic.
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