Gabor Takacs-Nagy: I was a celebrated violinist — then suddenly I lost control of my hand.
He’s reinvented himself as a conductor after a psychological collapse stopped him being able to play the instrument he loved.
No strings: Gabor Takacs-Nagy conducting the Camerata ANTHONY ROBLING.
By Jessica Duchen
Sunday July 03 2022, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
At first Gabor Takacs-Nagy thought that he was just exhausted. The violinist was on stage in Tokyo, performing Bartok’s String Quartet No 5, when he felt a tension in his right hand. “I could not use the whole bow,” he recalls. “We were in the middle of a huge tour, so I thought I was tired, but later this tension in my hand increased and I could use less and less bow. And it was quite tragic, this thing.”
Takacs-Nagy made a living playing the violin, as the dynamic and expressive founder and leader of the Takacs string quartet. Yet increasingly he found he was unable to play. He took a half-year break in Budapest, where he was born, trying to relearn the violin, but when he tried to come back, with a concert at the Law Society in London, he realised the problem had not gone away. “It went so badly that afterwards we agreed that it cannot go on and I left the quartet. I never could solve it.”
That was in October 1992. Thirty years later, Takacs-Nagy, now 66, has reinvented himself — as a conductor. He is principal conductor of the Manchester Camerata (which is convenient since his wife, Lesley, is from Burnley). He has rarely spoken about his injury, but the pandemic changed his view. He is spearheading the Camerata’s 50th anniversary celebrations, which include some short films about its musicians’ lives. For one of them he has finally decided to tell his remarkable story in a film called Untold (below).
Takacs-Nagy: “The Camerata knows that music is a spiritual medicine”
ROBERTO SERRA/GETTY IMAGES
“During the pandemic everybody was filled with fear,” Takacs-Nagy says. “There were no concerts and I thought we should send out stories showing that we mustn’t be discouraged. I had gone through a bleak time when I could not play the violin and had to leave the Takacs Quartet, but now I am on stage, making music. The darkness turned to light. So, with the right spirit, we can beat this Covid time too.”
He is convinced the issue was psychological and went to many psychiatrists. “It was a very difficult time in my life. My mother had a tendency to depression and I think this gave me a feeling of guilt that I had left Hungary — in 1986 we had moved to the University of Colorado Boulder as quartet in residence. I think my violin technique was not solid enough, so everything collapsed as soon as I wasn’t mentally in the right state. I am sorry I was not a stronger person.”
Takacs-Nagy was born six months before the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. His father, an economist, was later jailed for his support for the ill-fated uprising. “He was in prison for a year and afterwards my parents lost their jobs so we were very poor.” When Takacs-Nagy was seven, he says, “a gentleman came to the classroom and asked, ‘Who would like to learn the violin?’ I immediately put up my hand.”
At Budapest’s Franz Liszt Music Academy he and three fellow students, Karoly Schranz, Gabor Ormai and Andras Fejer, formed the Takacs Quartet in 1975. They were part of a golden age of Hungarian musicians emerging from the institution. “We were the luckiest generation,” Takacs-Nagy says. “We had genius teachers like Gyorgy Kurtag, Ferenc Rados and Andras Mihaly. They tolerated tiny mistakes, but if we played a note without spiritual meaning we were in big trouble. We were looking nonstop for what’s happening behind the notes. We are like actors, but dealing with notes, not words.”
Rather than taking jobs in orchestras or teaching, they devoted themselves to their quartet. This intense work ethic paid dividends, enabling them to travel out of Hungary; crucially the music gave them space to be themselves. “In this society people had to think five times before saying anything, but when we played music we could be honest, open our hearts and trust our instincts.” They won the Portsmouth String Quartet Competition in 1979. “Yehudi Menuhin was president of the jury and gave us unbelievable encouragement. Imagine: we were four boys from communist Hungary, meeting the great Menuhin, and he’s saying we are excellent.” A decade of stardom ensued —until his hand problem began.
It was the Hungarian-British conductor Georg Solti who first suggested he should try conducting, in 1991. “He told me that my body language was very clear,” Takacs-Nagy recalls. Ten years later, another Hungarian violinist and conductor, Tibor Varga, asked him to conduct a chamber orchestra. More and more people saw in his conducting the same incandescent music-making that had informed his quartet playing. “My mission is inspiring and helping the musicians, not judging or criticising them,” he says. “If they feel that I love the music and them more than I love my ego, then they follow everything.”
This month he will conduct Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 with the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra in Switzerland and will be principal guest conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Then there is his work with the Camerata.
“The Camerata knows that music is a spiritual medicine,” he says. “We are telling a story in every note. What we see in the score is only the envelope; we have to play the letter, which is invisible.” The orchestra pushes the boundaries with its popular Hacienda Classical series and an award-winning programme, Music in Mind, to aid dementia sufferers.
“Today, when there are so many problems around us, music still lifts and heals you,” he says. “I am the luckiest person in the world.”
Gabor Takacs-Nagy conducts the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra on Jul 16 and 18, webcast on Medici TV. His next concert with Manchester Camerata is at Stoller Hall, Manchester, Sept 23; their recordings of Mozart piano concertos with the soloist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet are out on Chandos. manchestercamerata.co.uk