Preview: Tokyo String Quartet at the Auckland Town Hall

What: Tokyo String Quartet
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Friday 8pm
On disc: Beethoven String Quartets Opp. 74 & 95 (Harmonia Mundi, through Ode Records)

Just a week away from the Tokyo String Quartet's Auckland concert, first violinist Martin Beaver is in Brussels, sitting on the jury of the prestigious Queen Elizabeth International Music Competition.

"It's strange," he says. "Every so often you hear a candidate you think gave a wonderful performance and he or she gets the most lukewarm applause, whereas others who weren't so great at all get bravos. People often listen with their eyes."

The Canadian violinist has been with the Tokyo String Quartet for seven years now but even as a student, his ears had singled this group out as "one of the most polished of the quartets around, with such a strong sense of projecting as one".

After seven years on the road with Kikuei Ikeda, Kazuhide Isomura and Clive Greensmith, he can reflect on the personal and collegial pressure of being in an ensemble which schedules around 100 concerts a year, which he admits is "a fair amount of time to be with one another".

"We're very careful to maintain a sense of real democracy. Everybody has his say and we pride ourselves on being a 'leaderless' quartet," he says.

He certainly has no regrets about focusing on quartet playing as "some of the greatest composers have created their most meaningful works for this medium. Our repertoire is not only so deep in terms of quality but vast in its scope.

"Even with all the concerts we do, there's no way I'll get through even half of what's out there."

Inevitably, the Tokyo String Quartet will always be preceded by its latest CD, and the most recent is a tempting instalment from the Quartet's complete Beethoven cycle. These interpretations of the Opus 74 and Opus 95 works are so vibrantly alive that listeners might feel they are hovering over the strings themselves, perhaps even jumping at the wild sforzandi.

Beaver laughs and is clearly pleased with my reaction. "It's a balancing act, trying to catch the immediacy and capitalise on the acoustics of any given hall. In fact, the most tense time is at the beginning of a recording session, working on the sound of the individual instruments and the overall colour and blend."

These four men are competing against an impressive roster of other groups in recording all 16 of Beethoven's Quartets, not discounting their own previous set from the early 1990s.

Approaching these works for the second time, the Tokyo players are incorporating subtle changes from recent scholarly editions. "It's given us a new sense of responsibility," Beaver says, "especially with the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven."

Haydn opens the group's Auckland concert on Friday which sets off with the fifth of his Opus 76 Quartets. "It's a brilliant work with a lovely, lovely slow movement. We thought it would sit well with Janacek's Intimate Letters that follows it."

Beaver and his colleagues undertook a marathon of all six of the Haydn Opus 76 Quartets in Milan and were surprised backstage by pianist Alfred Brendel, who just happened to be carrying a score of the work.

"We were certainly happy that we saw him after the concert and not before," laughs Beaver, who goes on to say the 78-year-old Brendel now holds Haydn and Handel as the composers closest to his heart.

"It's typical that a lot of people dismiss Haydn as being light and not so deep musically," Beaver muses. "But there is such erudition and wit as well as that sense of his being such a pioneer. His music is the cornerstone of what we play."