The miracle of watching a great string quartet perform

Joseph Haydn, it’s generally agreed, invented the string quartet. And having done so, he re-invented it: again and again. Take his quartet Op. 20, No. 2, of 1772 – the first item in the Takacs Quartet’s recital last week at the Wigmore Hall.

The cello propels itself forward and upward, then starts to warble like a bird on the wing. The viola sketches in a rudimentary bass line; the second violin – higher than the cello on paper, but actually playing at a lower pitch – shadows the melody in its flight. The first violin? Nothing: the leader (or so you might imagine) of the group is entirely silent until finally, blissfully, he isn’t. It’s the opposite of how a string quartet is supposed to begin, and it’s perfect. Haydn had completed his first really convincing quartet – cracked the formula, if you like – in 1769. Just three years later, left alone with Prince Esterhazy’s court musicians in a Hungarian swamp, he’d come further than some composers travel in a lifetime.

The founding members of the Borodin Quartet signed their first contract in human blood

The Takacs Quartet laid the whole miracle out there, plain and (deceptively) simple. Andras Fejer, the group’s cellist, is also its sole original member – the only survivor of the team that Gabor Takacs-Nagy assembled in Budapest in 1975.

But Takacs-Nagy’s successor as first violin, the Leamington-born Edward Dusinberre, has been in place for well over half the group’s existence, and by this stage of the game – when most aficionados would probably agree that the Takacs is the finest string quartet now performing anywhere in the world – their playing is seamless. Yet it’s the opposite of anodyne. Half the fun of seeing a string quartet playing live is watching the interpersonal dynamics on stage: decoding the body language, the little nods and sideways glances that hold it all together.