It's fascinating to compare this mellifluous, warmly blended account of Dvorak's Second Piano Quintet with the more assertive - and marginally more intense - Andras Schiff/Panocha Quartet production that I reviewed back in July. Where Schiff's playing was capricious and athletic, with bags of contrapuntal incident, the relatively restrained Andreas Haefliger suits the Takacs's mellower sound.
Nowadays, the Takacs favours full-bodied tone production, limpid phrasing and relatively wide-pooled vibrato. In the 'Dumka' second movement the accent is more on sadness than on joy (the two moods alternate), whereas Haefliger sounds excitedly impatient at around 5'56'' into the first movement. Notice too how, at 1'42'' into the finale, he accentuates the little 'hunting call' phrase that the strings had played a few bars earlier. The coda is taken very broadly, anticipating the lovingly protracted farewells that crown both the Cello Concerto and the New World Symphony. Like Schiff et al, Haefliger and the Takacs play the first-movement repeat.
Another strong digital contender in the Quintet features Martin Roscoe with the Schidlof Quartet, a conscientious and attentive reading (again, with the first-movement repeat intact), coupled with a considered account of the American Quartet. As to the analogue stakes, Stnpan, Panenka, Firkusný and Lateiner all revel in the multi-faceted glories of this wonderful work, and their respective colleagues are suitably responsive.
Schiff's leading ace card is his coupling, the E flat Piano Quartet (in my view, Dvorak's greatest chamber work with piano). The Takacs, on the other hand, offers us the rather more modest String Quartet, B92, an immensely likeable work composed in response to a commission from the leader of the Florentine Quartet. Dvorak's brief, according to Jan Smaczny's excellent notes, was to provide a piece with a Slavonic spirit, though the resulting work is less obviously 'folksy' than, say, the American Quartet, or even the wonderful D minor Quartet, B75. Again, the performance is very fine, with vivid instrumental interplay, gentle pizzicato arpeggios from cellist Andras Fejer at the start of the second movement and plenty of gusto in the finale (with a second set that verges on the Elgarian). The sound is excellent.'