The Hagen Quartet celebrates three decades of music without concession

Austrian training tells 30-year career at the highest level, between a new approach and a directory intact joy to ride together on stage

A certain presence. In the way you scan, something challenging and caring at a time. The four members of legendary Hagen Quartet took place, lodge, facing four cups of tea that mix their delicate mist. The stage awaits them in just one hour, but Rainer Schmidt, Lukas, Veronika and Clemens Hagen take the time chosen words to trace 30-year career they celebrate this year.

An almost biological siblings, then, but a real clan. Their cohesion breathtaking, last Friday at the Music Room of La Chaux-de-Fonds, in a program Haydn, Bartok and Beethoven. Mainstay of their repertoire, which documents a fifty recordings appeared mostly at Deutsche Grammophon - a label they have left to sign in Myrios Classic, due to artistic differences.

After a concert at the Metropolitan Museum in 1985, the critic of The New York Times had mentioned a "style came from the old world" about this set from a family originally from Salzburg Austria, following the successive departures of Angelika Hagen (now ethnologist) and Annette Bik second fiddle to the desk, the arrival of the German Rainer Schmidt to stabilize the quartet in 1987.

A stylish game, then. But agreed? Surely not. Twenty-five years later, if the Hagen show that takes an instrumental domination of the aristocracy, the way they articulate the musical highlight is a desire to give life again and again their grammar sound. A La Chaux-de-Fonds, their Fourth of Bartók dazzles with its sprays of cool flames, almost abrasive. Haydn (Opus 33 No. 2), treated with virtually no vibrato, has a reflective purity, while the Opus 131 of Beethoven, a heartbreaking intensity, always based on accents, punctuation of the score .

"Yes, we obviously have evolved over the 30 years of working together, confirms the first violinist Lukas Hagen. We are looking more than ever to perceive music as a language in itself, so as not to leave the items metric curb our freedom. "On their anniversary disc, Myrios published by the Hagen play Mozart with a sense of declamation, rhetoric expressed in tiny pulse dynamics, and management of uncomplicated silences. "We wanted to tackle Mozart in a less ideological note Rainer Schmidt. Of course, we were influenced by the Viennese tradition of our masters. But there is no reason to stay stuck in the late eighteenth century. If we consult all possible sources musicological is to transpose in 2011.