Critic’s Notebook: Pavel Haas Quartet Makes the Ears Dance in an All-Czech Program

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Tiefenbeglückender Ohrentanz, gänzlich tschechisch: Bekanntes Ungehörtes, unerhört Beliebtes: Das Pavel Haas Quartet im Musikverein, mit einem Abend zum Schwärmen

Bohuslav Martinů String Quartets 2, 3, 5, 7 Pavel Haas Quartet (Supraphon, 2025) US | UK | DE

Bedrich Smetana The String Quartets Pavel Haas Quartet (Supraphon, 2015) US | UK | DE

Raving in Czech

The Known-unheard and outrageously popular: the Pavel Haas Quartet and an evening of chamber music to make your ears swoon

What a program — on paper alone. Who? One of the most celebrated string quartets of our time, Prague's Pavel Haas Quartet. Where? The Muskverein's Brahms-Saal. What? An entirely Czech program, running from the sole string quartet of the short-lived Vítězslava Kaprálová (1935) through Bohuslav Martinů's Fifth Quartet (1938) to that most reliable of pleasures, Antonín Dvořák's Fourteenth and last quartet, in A-flat major, op. 105 (1895). Kaprálová's music, barely two dozen works in total, has been rediscovered in spasmodically over the decades, tenaciously if intermittently — but one does not actually get to hear it very often. (Or else it's hidden in well-meaning but generally dismal "look: Women composers!" programs that are such an ironic, unintended bane to composers that happen to have been women.) This is a substantial three-movement quartet of some twenty minutes, written by a twenty-year-old nearing the end of her studies in Brno: rhythmic, mobile, tonal, but facing boldly forward — unsurprisingly in the musical orbit of Schulhoff, Pavel Haas, and Martinů. Certain works carry a luminous seriousness and quality that shimmers through them; Kaprálová's op.8 is one of those.

The Fifth Quartet of Martinů was not chosen as a companion piece, merely because it's a sensationally effective work at the intersection of Bartók, Shostakovich, and Janáček, and (like all of Martinů's quartets, which the Pavel Haas Quartet is currently recording for Supraphon) deserves to be far better known. Kaprálová is also the direct inspiration for the piece: she was Martinů's student in Paris for three years — and thereafter, in all likelihood, his lover. Think of it as Martinů's equivalent of Janáček's "Intimate Letters" — quartet. The work rocks from the opening bar with an irresistibility that seems to want to carry the momentum of Kaprálová's dynamic finale straight into itself. The relentless climaxes of the partially spooky Adagio, each time the Pavel Haas Quartet allowed them to relax, offered a delicious shiver of complex lyricism. As fragile as the movement dissolves, so wild does the Allegro vivo return — with maximum, ferocious forward thrust. Feet and heads bobbed in the audience, pretty much universally. The viola-throaty tone of the first violin in the finale's Lento feigned relaxation before the irresistible surge of the Allegro that followed.

Throughout all, one didn't actually pay all that much attention to the quartet's playing as such — because it seems to function by itself, entirely naturally: what one hears is not interpretation but music. Here, as in the Dvořák — whose fugal opening gradually yields to the composer's characteristic melodic abundance — it was the tonal richness of the ensemble that was so arresting. This isn't some pretty-playing style they indulge in, but a style that adapts, like an octopus, to its musical environment as needed: pallid, wild, sweet, spiky — irresistible. One could look elsewhere for finer individualists: the second violin in the Quatuor Ébène, the viola in the Belcea Quartet, the Cuarteto Casals' cello. But anyone who can make your ears dance the way this quartet did in the Dvořák is offering something singular — and seems to make this argument: one good string quartet evening is worth ten orchestral concerts, so sustainably and deeply satisfying are these hours.

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