Chamber music

Once upon a time in communist Hungary – 1975, in fact – four students at the Liszt Academy decided to form a string quartet. That’s always an interesting choice. For a gifted and ambitious young musician, it takes a special kind of self-knowledge to pool your artistic future with three colleagues. But it’s what followed that makes the Takacs Quartet so fascinating. A relocation from the eastern bloc to the free West, the retirement of all but one of the founding members – and yet 51 years later the Takacs Quartet is still, recognisably, the same group. Some would say that it’s currently the finest string quartet in the world.  But throughout the story, there has been one constant: the group’s cellist, Andras Fejer.

The quartet is the basic unit of string chamber music. Two violins, a viola and a cello: subtract any one of those, and you’re walking a tightrope. Add further players and the issue is redundancy: you’d better know precisely what you want to do with those additional voices, because otherwise they’ll congeal like cold gravy. When it comes to the string octet – two string quartets fused together – only the 16-year-old Mendelssohn really cracked it, going all out for transparency, daring and youthful verve. The Romanian George Enescu took the opposite approach. His Octet of 1900 is chamber music as epic construction project, wrought from steel, not spindrift.

Puccini’s Turandot is back at the Royal Opera in the 40-year old production by Andrei Serban and… well, guilty pleasure is an unfashionable notion these days, but I still feel a batsqueak of shame at enjoying it so much. It’s not the chinoiserie – anyone who believes that an opera based on an 18th-century Italian pantomime should be taken literally is probably beyond help. No, it’s a Spectator headline from years back that still nags. ‘Turandot is a disgusting opera that is beyond redemption’ was the gist of a review of this same staging by the late Michael Tanner, and if it was anyone else you’d put it down to snobbery and move on. But you can’t do that with Tanner, a thinker of piercing intelligence who spent decades interrogating how opera works and why it matters.

They do things their own way in Liverpool; they always have. In 1997 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra launched a contemporary music group called Ensemble 10:10 (the name came from the post-concert time-slot of their early performances). For a decade now, they’ve also administered the Rushworth Prize, an annual competition for young composers based in the north-west. And while classical fads and crises have come and gone, the RLPO has held its friends close and tended its garden. The result? The kind of artistic self-assurance that lets you put your chief conductor in charge of a première by a novice composer, and then call in a Barenboim to guarantee a full house.

It’s a right mess, the classical piano trio; the unintended consequence of one of musical history’s more frustrating twists. When the trio first evolved, in the age of Haydn, the piano (or at any rate, its frail domestic forebear) was the junior partner, and the two string instruments, violin and cello, were added to make the silly thing audible. Then the piano started to evolve, while its partners – give or take the odd tweak – really didn’t, much. The end result, by the second half of the 19th century, completely reversed the original balance of power, leaving the two string instruments thrashing for dear life against the onslaught of that glossy, black, all-devouring monster, the modern concert grand.

It is 100 years since the death of Gabriel Fauré, a composer whose spellbinding romantic tunes emerge from harmonies and rhythms that nudge us towards the future. No other composer deploys such subversive mastery of the conventions of French music: again and again, if we look underneath the arches of his melodies, we find ambiguous chromatic shifts or disorientating spiralling arpeggios. For some critics, the musical argument of Fauré’s late chamber work is so understated it evaporates And – see above – no other French composer is so hard to describe without falling into a purple puddle.

Scottish Opera’s new production of Albert Herring updates the action to 1990, and hey – remember 1990? No, not particularly, and I suspect that’ll be a common reaction if you were actually around back then. The director Daisy Evans was a toddler at the time and she imagines a gaudy, tawdry small-town world of bum-bags, WeightWatchers and decrepit gas heaters. Loxford Village Hall looks like it hasn’t been redecorated since the year the opera was composed, 1947, and that certainly rings true. Blancmange for the May Day feast, though? I’m pretty sure that even under John Major, blancmange was a throwback. But Evans has a show to put on after all, and a pink wobbling gelatine-based dessert is more theatrical than a bowl of Monster Munch.