We're told that the present Danish Quartet (apparently the third generation to appropriate this title) was formed as recently as 1985, with its leader and violist drawn from the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and its second violin and cellist from the Royal Orchestra. Whereas the CD catalogue's last contenders in Brahms's three string quartets, the Melos Quartet of Stuttgart on DG, coupled them with Schumann's three quartets in a three disc set playing for 179 minutes, here we get just Brahms (minus his first movement exposition repeats) on two discs lasting only 95 minutes—which at once puts the Danes at a certain commercial disadvantage.
They themselves are young and eager. For them Brahms is no dry-as-dust antiquitarian (of the kind described by Hugo Wolf while masquerading as a critic) but a romantic to the core from whose crotchets and quavers the last drop has to be squeezed. Basically, of course, they are right. I only wish they had set about their task with more concern for the longer paragraphs (as opposed to shorter-term point-making) that give these works their breadth, and likewise with a keener ear for elegance and continuity of line—and tonal refinement too. The recording itself is clear enough to pick up intakes of breath as well as occasional surface contact of bow and strings (as at the start of the development in the A minor Quartet's first movement) in proof of the players' involvement at moments of heightened excitement. But it leaves no doubt that Danish strings are made more of wire than gut.
It was just at that moment in my review when the postman arrived with a coupling of Brahms's Nos. 1 and 2 from Hungary's youthful Takacs Quartet (and, incidentally, it plays for 66 minutes as against the 61'48'' of the Danes' first disc, in part because of including first movement exposition repeats). We're not told if they intend to follow it with the less frequently recorded No. 3 in B flat. I certainly hope so, for in the tonal mellowness and bloom of the recording itself, not to mention their own intuitively musical phrasing, their intimate interplay and subtleties of balance, this disc somehow manages to bring home Brahms's true richness as a quartet composer in a way that the hard-trying Danish players and production team just fail to do. In the C minor Quartet's first movement I admired the Hungarians' stronger sense of direction: their dramatic contrast of assertive challenge and lyrical assuagement is achieved without any loss of sustained impulse. In the Romanze they respond to intimacies without allowing their pianissimo to sound as withdrawn and spectral as that of the Danes—and instances in this movement are by no means the only places where the Danish players over-react in this un-Brahmsian way. In the Allegretto I prefer the Hungarians' phrasing of the main theme, at once simpler and subtler in its inflexion, just as I did their greater intensity in the climaxes of the finale.
In the A minor Quartet I felt that the Danes scarcely matched the Hungarians in continuity and elegance of line in the opening Allegro non troppo, and perhaps still more in the slow movement, where I also preferred the Takacs's keener awareness of internal subtleties, with many, many lovely things from the cello. The Takacs's Minuetto in its turn is more gracious, and predictably the Hungarian-tinged finale more aflame—and more artfully coloured and timed towards the end.'