Takács Quartet

Takács Quartet play the Sohmen Concert Hall at the Schwarzman Centre on Thursday 19 November, starting at 19:30. It's part of A Very Short Introduction to Chamber Music, a series curated with Professor Laura Tunbridge, who'll be introducing the evening.

The programme puts a contemporary piece between two cornerstones of the quartet repertoire. They open with Haydn's Quartet in G major Op.77 No.1, followed by Carlos Simon's Warmth from Other Suns, and they close with Brahms' Quartet in C minor Op.51 No.1. It's a broad spread for one night: Haydn's classical clarity, a modern voice in Simon, and the late-Romantic weight of Brahms.

Takács have been at the front of chamber music for five decades. They formed in Budapest in 1975, when Gábor Takács-Nagy, Károly Schranz, Gábor Ormai and András Fejér were students at the city's Franz Liszt Academy. They first made their mark winning international competitions in Evian, Portsmouth, Bordeaux, Budapest and Bratislava, before their North American debut in 1982. Now in their sixth decade, the quartet consists of Edward Dusinberre and Harumi Rhodes on violins, Richard O'Neill on viola and Mihai Marica on cello. They're known for authoritative readings of the core quartet repertoire, imaginative programming and close collaborations with leading composers.

They're Associate Artists at London's Wigmore Hall, where they became the first quartet to receive the Wigmore Hall Medal in 2014. Since 2005 they've recorded for Hyperion, picking up three Gramophone Awards, a Grammy and three Japanese Record Academy Awards along the way. The concert is at the Sohmen Concert Hall, inside the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities at the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter on Woodstock Road (OX2 6GG), with the music starting at 19:30.