Hungarian Gábor Takács-Nagy came to fame as the leader of the Takács Quartet, with whom he played for 17 years. In 2002, he turned to conducting and is currently music director of the Manchester Camerata and principal guest conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra. On 17 May, he conducts the Manchester Camerata in the penultimate concert of his ‘Mozart, Made in Manchester’ series at the Stoller Hall, with pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. Here, Gábor chooses seven pieces of classical music to improve your mental health and soothe your soul.
The best classical music for your mental health
Mozart: Ave Verum Corpus
Mozart wrote this motet just a few months before he died and, listening to it, I sense that he felt his time was running out. There is a transcendence to this music that is hard to find anywhere else.
It has a connection to the world above – not in a religious sense exactly, but it is far removed from the problems of everyday life. Playing or conducting it is like taking a spiritual tonic: I come out of it feeling younger and calmer, wondering why I waste my time on doubts and fears.
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, III: Adagio molto e cantabile
Beethoven once said that anyone who understood his music spiritually would be able to shed the problems of their life. That is certainly true of this piece. After hearing it, I no longer feel jealousy or anguish; I’m not afraid of death.
And this is remarkable, coming, as it does, from a composer whose life was full of problems: hearing problems, the difficulty of always living life alone, of forever craving somebody’s love. Beethoven found love in nature, God and humanity as a whole, and the slow movement of his Ninth Symphony makes that very clear.
More of the best classical music for your mental health
Schubert: String Quintet, D956, II: Adagio
It’s no wonder that the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein wanted to die while listening to this piece. I’ve just finished reading War and Peace and I believe that Tolstoy and Schubert were expressing the same sentiments: honesty, warmth, spirituality, consolation, the depth and complexity of human experience.
This was a composer who never had a real love, but in this movement, I think he found everything that he was looking for in life. If I could take one movement with me to a desert island, I would choose this.
Beethoven: String Quartet Op. 135, III: Lento assai
Op. 135 was Beethoven’s very last string quartet. I played it many times with the Takács Quartet as an encore and I always got the sense that it helped the audience to understand the message of Beethoven: one of healing the soul with eternal calm and love.
Sometimes I have brief moments – say 30 seconds – when I think, ‘Wow, now I understand everything clearly’, where I feel able to reconcile myself to the shortcomings in my life. This piece helps to bring me to that point.
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 17, II: Andante
This is a piece that is very close to me as I recorded it with my friend, the pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. Mozart once wrote to his friend that the making of a genius is not talent or hard work, but love for others. And you can hear that so clearly in this piece.
Listening to it is like going into a beautiful forest and suddenly stopping in a meadow and thinking, ‘This is so simple, so natural. And how great it is to be alive just in order to be able to experience this.’
Haydn: The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross – ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’
This moment in Haydn’s Seven Last Words, where you suddenly arrive in C major, is the most representative portrayal of paradise that I’ve ever heard in music: free of all suffering and anguish.
I am something between a believer and a non-believer. But once when I conducted this music with the Manchester Camerata, I had goose pimples and I thought, ‘Now I believe in God’. Even now, I feel there must be some higher force out there. How else could Haydn dream up this magical music?
Brahms: A German Requiem, V: Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit
This soprano solo is one of the shortest movements in Brahms’s German Requiem, but I’ve never found a moment in any Requiem that more fully conveys a sense of humanity. It portrays the love between a mother and son.
Brahms wrote the Requiem just after the death of his mother and I’ve always felt that this movement was a homage to her. I programmed this piece just a few months after my own mother had died and, for me too, it was an expression of my relationship with her.