The Subtly Seductive Sounds of Thoughtful Takacs Quartet

The Takacs Quartet is an ensemble that prefers to coax, charm and seduce you rather than grab you by the throat and shake you to attention.

Subtle and undemonstrative, violinists Edwin Dusinberre and Karoly Schranz, violist Roger Tapping and cellist Andras Fejer tended to pull in listeners by bringing an uncanny calm to a three-part program Tuesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. Or at least to its two standard repertory works--Haydn’s Quartet in D, Opus 20, No. 4, and Dvorak’s Quartet in E flat, Opus 51, No. 10.

The third piece--Bright Sheng’s Quartet No. 3, composed in 1993 and dedicated to the group--unleashed a different kind of effect.

Bach is not a composer usually associated with Haydn, but the four musicians evoked a kind of Bachian timelessness in the slow movement of Haydn’s quartet. It was as if there was all the time in the world to contemplate the glints and shades in a richly colored and faceted jewel. No individual voice or line stood out. Nothing was forced. All was matched and balanced.

This is not to say that the playing lacked passion. In the first movement especially, the quartet expressed the emotional turbulence beneath the refined surface, but always contained it with an almost aristocratic sense of reticence and restraint.

They took a similar approach to Dvorak’s quartet, but this proved less persuasive, emerging as a portrait in warm shades of gold, rather than one exploiting the music’s potentially bigger shifts in color, character, mood and drama. It was too calm.

Sheng’s Third Quartet was inspired by Tibetan folk music and dance, which the composer heard when he was exiled to the Land of the Snows during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The 20-minute piece--in one continuous movement--begins with eerie harmonics, passes through sequences of vigorous and arresting rhythms and ends with an elegy of haunting beauty in memory of friends who didn’t survive the times. The quartet played the work with blazing power.

To show the work’s connections to Bartok, they offered the Allegretto pizzicato from that composer’s Fourth Quartet as the single encore.

* The Takacs Quartet performs March 18, 8 p.m., Schoenberg Hall, UCLA, $40, (310) 825-2101.