The Takacs Quartet graces us with six superb concerts a year. It's true that they sometimes hanker after strange new composers — Psathos, Part etc. — whose compositions set my teeth on edge like the vile squealings of the wry-necked fife or like a brazen canstick turned or like the gratings of a dry wheel on an axletree — but mostly they play what distinguished Quartets are ordained to play, that is, the great central European tradition from Haydn to Brahms. But last night, the Takacs, eek and alas, ventured into new and grim territory. Horribile dictu, they offered an original, commissioned Drama that purported to be Serious and Illuminating. It warn't. It was a interminable playlet about Beethoven's last years founded on the composer's letters and conversation books. It was barren. It was predictable, uninsightful, reductive, shallow, witless, dull, and pretentious. I started to squirm (boredom feeding on embarrassment and embarrassment on boredom) after a couple of minutes, then broke into a sweat, but after a few minutes resigned myself to my middle-of-the-row captivity and I did what I always do in such situations — recited to myself long-ago-memorized poetry. When the Drama mercifully ended, I was consoled to hear the woman in front of me (a member of the music faculty) say to her companion, "Do you think they know how bad that was?"
Do they? I hope so. I hope that the playwright, a tyro named —— Morse, recognizes that he's not Tom Stoppard or even Tom Stoppard diluted to a 1% tincture, and that he takes up a profession that inflicts less pain on innocent bystanders.
I left dispirited, especially for the actors, who tried to force a marriage of Shakespearean style of performance to prosaic vocabulary and sentence structures. I do not use the word "Shakespearean" in a good way: I refer to that highly artificial, unnatural way of speaking and moving that, inherited and debased from an ancient tradition, has stupefied and narcotized dutiful culture-hungry audiences at summer festivals all over America. Shakespeare himself was clear that he did not want his actors to strut and bellow, but strut and bellow was what they did last night. If the actors did not split the ears of all the groundlings, they certainly split mine. Why do they speak in that ridiculous manner when their aim should be "to hold the mirror up to nature." It's wrong of me to say so, but I felt that I could look into the soul of the actor who played Beethoven and see a man who imagined that he was playing Lear at the Old Vic, when he was in fact performing in a play that might, just might, satisfy the requirements for an M.A. in creative writing at some off-brand college ("he's worked very hard on this so we might as well pass him"), and that he was going to show "them" how it's done, but instead he offered us sufferers a copy of a copy of a pale copy.
Egads, I'm breaking into a sweat again just thinking about it.
I pay good money to hear the Takacs — and concert after concert, I get my money's worth, and much more. I want Schubert. I want Mozart. If I wanted amateur theatricals, I would go to he local dinner theater. Or to the high school around the corner.
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