While the concept of the programmatic and autobiographical quartet seems to have been introduced by Beethoven, nowhere has it been taken up more forcefully than in the Czech lands, as the works presented here attest.

Leoš Janáček’s First Quartet, subtitled ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, is based on a novella by Leo Tolstoy, which deals with such subjects as marriage, adultery and murder, all of which are evoked here by highly expressive music. The Second Quartet, the last major work he completed, is subtitled ‘Intimate Letters’. The special feature of this unique and miraculous quartet, full of love songs and eruptions, is the intense and euphoric expression of the composer’s inspirational and unrequited passion for a young woman.

Pavel Haas, who studied with Janáček in Brno in the 1920s, composed his Second String Quartet subtitled ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ in 1925. Although the composer claims that he intended to evoke ‘pleasant summer holidays in the country’, it seems that the work also evokes a love story. A surprise is in store for us in the final movement, entitled ‘A Wild Night’: percussion is added to the string quartet and contributes to the jazzy atmosphere. It is played here by the Scottish virtuoso Colin Currie.

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Janáček: String Quartet No.1, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ (1923): 1. Adagio – Con moto
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Janáček: String Quartet No.1, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ (1923): 2. Con moto
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Janáček: String Quartet No.1, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ (1923): 3. Con moto – Vivo – Andante
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Janáček: String Quartet No.1, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ (1923): 4. Con moto – (Adagio) – Più mosso
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Janáček: String Quartet No.2, ‘Intimate Letters’ (1928): 1. Andante – Con moto – Allegro
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Janáček: String Quartet No.2, ‘Intimate Letters’ (1928): 2. Adagio – Vivace
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Janáček: String Quartet No.2, ‘Intimate Letters’ (1928): 3. Moderato – Adagio – Allegro
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Janáček: String Quartet No.2, ‘Intimate Letters’ (1928): 4. Allegro – Andante – Adagio
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Haas: String Quartet No.2, op.7 ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ (1925): 1. Landscape. Andante
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Haas: String Quartet No.2, op.7 ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ (1925): 2. Cart, Driver and Horse. Andante
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Haas: String Quartet No.2, op.7 ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ (1925): 3. The Moon and I…. Largo e misterioso
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Haas: String Quartet No.2, op.7 ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ (1925): 4. A Wild Night. Vivace e con fuoco

Europadisc Review

In his excellent booklet notes to the Escher Quartet’s new disc of works by Leoš Janáček and Pavel Haas, Czech music expert Michael Beckermann highlights the tensions between ‘absolute’ and ‘programme’ music, before describing how these two composers were simultaneously able to inhabit both worlds. Both of Janáček’s quartets appear to have programmatic roots, the First based on Leo Tolstoy’s racy novella The Kreutzer Sonata, the Second (titled ‘Intimate Letters’) on his own infatuation with his younger (but happily married) muse Kamila Stösslová. Yet pinpointing the programmatic substance proves enormously difficult in music that teems – and at times erupts – with strikingly individual ideas which thrive on bold contrasts. If there is any sort of ‘narrative’ here, it is far from being an uncomplicatedly linear one.

The New York-based Escher Quartet, acclaimed for its quartet cycles of Zemlinsky (on Naxos) and Mendelssohn (on BIS), tackles the technical and interpretative challenges of these two Janáček masterpieces head-on, relishing their vibrant juxtapositions. In the deceptively concise First Quartet (1923) they succeed like few other ensembles in balancing gritty incisiveness with musical expressiveness. The listener is immediately struck by the heavy intake of breath at the outset and the carefully deployed rubato in the jerky dance motif that follows, so that there's a quasi-improvisatory feel to the music as it unfolds.

Other groups may bring greater edginess to the ghostly sul ponticello tremolos in the second movement, while yet others may find more sheer tonal beauty, but none find such a happy medium, nor inhabit it so fully. The Eschers manage to infuse the canon that opens the third movement (itself derived from Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata) with the intense emotional claustrophobia of Janáček's opera Káťa Kabanová (1921). And, thanks as much to their own musicality as to the ideally balanced recording in Saxmundham’s Potton Hall, they bring a level of detail and focus to the inner parts that is second to none. The closing pages are simply glorious.

Just as impressive is their account of ‘Intimate Letters’ (1928), composed just months before Janáček’s death. Beginning as if in medias res, the first movement makes a particularly special feature of sudden gear-shifts – from the opening Andante to the almost prosaic, stroll-in-the-park Con moto at bar 52, for instance – and all are tackled with a brilliant feel for the composer’s idiom. The second movement’s scurrying demisemiquaver ostinati are dispatched with brilliant urgency, while thanks to the lower engine-room of viola and cello the third movement’s explosive central Adagio has rarely erupted with such gut-wrenching forcefulness. The final movement opens in a spiky folk style that is typically Janáčekian, but its working out is one of the greatest glories in the composer’s output, and the Eschers never put a foot wrong. The climactic sul ponticello chords (5’14”) are forceful without overshadowing what follows, and the urgency of the closing pages is infectious.

Despite its exotic-sounding subtitle, Pavel Haas’s String Quartet no.2 ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ (1925) takes its name from an area in the Czech Moravian Highlands, where Haas (a pupil of Janáček’s, and one of a lost generation of Czech composers who perished in the Nazi extermination camps of World War II) took a sojourn in the early 1920s. The movements’ individual titles – ‘Landscape’, ‘Cart, Driver and Horse’, ‘The Moon and I’ and ‘A Wild Night’ – are evocative rather than closely descriptive, while Haas’s musical language blends the folk-flavoured early modernism of his teacher with a jazzy element that is most evident in the final movement, but also includes bluesy inflections throughout. The dizzy sliding (replete with glissandi) of the second movement is the most obvious moment of pictorialism, offset by spiky pizzicati and a more rhythmically animated trio-like episode, while the third movement is a mysterious, static soundscape with affecting viola solos. The Eschers bring as sure a touch to Haas’s music as they do to Janáček’s, and in the jazzy finale they are joined by the animated percussion playing of Colin Currie. Listening to this performance, one is filled with regrets (not for the first time) that Haas died so cruelly and prematurely. His music is in no way overshadowed by that of his erstwhile teacher, and this performance caps a remarkably compelling album.

Also released this week is a disc of chamber works by Grażyna Bacewicz and Joachim Mendelson, the latter a Polish near contemporary of Haas’s who was also a victim of the Nazi atrocities. In performances featuring the Silesian Quartet, the music ranges from Schoenbergian post-Romanticism to the spikier modernism of Bacewicz’s mid-1960s Quartet. This Chandos disc is definitely worth checking out for those interested in the wider 20th-century developments in Central European chamber music.