Takacs String Quartet,

{TABLE} Quartet in F. Op 74, No 2 .... Haydn Quartet in F, Op 135 ......... Beethoven Quartet in G, D887 ........... Schubert {/TABLE} CHANGES of personnel are a fact of life for most long lived string quartets. Take, for instance, the Budapest Quartet, one of this century's most celebrated chamber ensembles. It was founded in 1917 by three Hungarians and a Budapest president Dutchman.

The changes began as early as 1922; by 1936 not a single founder member was left and the group's members were all Russian!

The Takacs Quartet, founded in Budapest in 1975 survived without changes for nearly two decades, until its leader, Gabor Takacs Nagy, departed in 1993.

He was replaced by an Englishman, Edward Dusinberre. After viola player Gabor Ormai fell victim to cancer, the ensemble chose a second English player, Roger Tapping, as a replacement.

Courtesy of the Limerick Music Association, the Takacs Quartet Mk I became a regular feature of the Irish musical scene after its first visit here in 1979.

The short lived Takacs Mk II came my way only once, late in 1993, when the performing strengths of its chosen programme (Mozart, Bartok, Beethoven) seemed to have shifted in Beethoven's favour.

Takacs Mk III revealed itself to the Dublin public for the first time at the Royal Hospital, Donnybrook last night, when the music of Bartok was notably absent, and perhaps wisely so.

The playing style has now changed considerably. The sense of conversational interplay which was for so long one of the group's hallmarks has been replaced by an altogether more strident projection.

There has been a move towards a style of solo with accompaniment (the leader getting the lion's share of the apparent solos), with a consequent loss of life to the inner voices.

In short, on this showing, the group seemed to me to have become a much blunter interpretative medium than it was in the past. The gains, such as they are, come from a rawness of emotion which found moments of apt expression in Schubert's great G major Quartet, but rarely, on this occasion, in the works by Haydn or Beethoven.