The music of Haydn floats through the University Church of St Mary’s. Each note is spoken with impeccable diction, voices plucked out to sing brightly over flurried layers of sound. Four musicians are seated before the altar, slowly coaxing glowing lines of song from their Stradivariuses. Suddenly it is brought to a halt. The cellist throws a glance at the vaulted ceiling. ‘What I’m really concerned about is how the articulation is going to sound in here’ he mutters as the quartet launches into a process of democratic consultation, broken only by the sound of a violin or viola testing the church acoustics. The legendary Tokyo String Quartet is warming up.
Founded in 1969 at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music, the Tokyo Quartet have come to dominate a position of unparalleled respect. With seven Grammy nominations, the Grand Prix du Disque Montreux and numerous Gramophone magazine nominations, the four musicians truly are the nobility of the classical music world – no mean feat in an obsessively competitive art form. The quartet are in Oxford to play a Japan benefit concert for victims of the earthquake and tsunami. ‘It’s our way of helping out, perhaps not financially but at least in spirit’, explains Kikuei Ikeda, second violin in the quartet. ‘Japan is a country that has experienced many problems. It’s a country that we feel a close connection to. It’s a country to which we often return.’
The quartet’s shifting relationship with Japan is one that has come to define its character. ‘We started off as four Japanese who went to the same school and who were rooted in the same background,’ says Ikeda. Over four decades on the quartet has faced striking cultural changes, not least the arrival of its first non-Japanese member in 1981. ‘There was huge pressure from our management to stay completely Japanese’, Ikeda recalls, ‘after all, we were the Tokyo Quartet! We had been Japanese for twelve years and that had created a culture where we always had to be the same. We tended to hide our personalities in the early years.’ Now composed of a Canadian, a Brit and two Japanese, the quartet seems remarkably free of any cultural tensions. ‘It was a huge change and above all it was a striking language change,’ Ikeda observes of his Western colleagues. ‘But it was what we needed. Cultural differences played a big part in removing us from an insular framework and granting us four independent minds.’Â
The quartet nevertheless remains something of an anomaly within classical music. Four Japanese creating a successful string quartet in the 1970’s within a tradition revolving around “dead white men” was always going to be surprising. While classical music has increasingly found a hungry market in the Far East, the old prejudices still remain. The recent signing of the Seoul Philharmonic to the great German label Deutsche Grammophon caused an uproar among conservative circles earlier this year. Ikeda acknowledges his quartet’s unique position. ‘We were certainly a significant change from the very beginning. To see four Japanese on stage playing classical music shocked many audiences! And we were lucky to emerge at just the right time. Any earlier and we may not have made it.’
So what are the quartet’s plans? ‘The music always comes first. That is very important,’ Ikeda reflects. ‘We‘ve spent the last three years working on Beethoven and it’s been an amazing journey. The musical life of Beethoven was unique – still so full of triumph to the very end’. But it’s time for a shift in the quartet‘s focus. ‘We’d love to revisit the Bartók quartets,’ enthuses Ikeda, ‘our record label, Harmonia Mundi, seems to be the only company that allows us the freedom to record what we want. That’s a wonderful thing. Revisiting works we have recorded before is always an interesting challenge. Tradition is always open to so many interpretations.’
I leave the musicians as they launch into a Schumann quartet, filling the church once more with delicately crafted sound. Classical music has increasingly been struggling with accusations of complacency and stagnation, not least in the unhappy era of arts cuts. The Tokyo Quartet seems to offer up an uncompromising proposition. The old school focus on the established string quartet repertoire is defiantly traditional. Yet the quartet’s supranational history is far from orthodox. In these times of crisis the Tokyo Quartet is a reminder of classical music’s heritage as well as a symbol for its potential to adapt.
