Pavel Haas Quartet members Marek Zwiebel, Luosha Fang, Veronika Jarůšková, and Peter Jarůšek (photography by Boris Giltburg, courtesy of SFP)
Last night in Herbst Theatre, the Pavel Haas Quartet returned to present their fifth recital for San Francisco Performances (SFP). In consulting my archives, I discovered (to my pleasant surprise) that I had attended most of their previous SFP recitals, going back to April of 2011, when the members of the quartet were Veronika Jarůšková and Eva Karová on violin, Pavel Nikl on viola, and Peter Jarůšek on cello. The ensemble was founded by Jarůšek and his wife; and, to this day, they are the only original members to have remained with the ensemble. The other current performers are Marek Zwiebel on second violin and violist Luosha Fang, the newest member of the ensemble, appearing last night for her first San Francisco performance with the ensemble.
My archives also informed me that this was the third of three consecutive programs in which the ensemble played one of the seven published string quartets of Bohuslav Martinů. (There were two earlier quartets: one lost and another reconstructed by Aleš Březina.) They performed his third quartet, composed in Paris in 1930, in the program they prepared for March of 2017; and their visit in February of 2020 included his sixth quartet, composed in New York in 1946. Last night they performed the final quartet, also composed in New York the following year and given the title “Concerto da camera.”
The context for this quartet is a dark one. The program note by Eric Bromberger describes it as follows:
On the evening of July 25 [1946], Martinů stepped off an unrailed balcony in the dark and fell a story to the ground, crushing part of his skull and spinal cord. He was unconscious for two days and in the hospital for five weeks, and his recovery was slow: he suffered from headaches and dizziness, he had to re-learn how to walk, and he would never fully escape the effects of this injury.
In spite of those circumstances, the seventh quartet was conceived the following year with a decidedly upbeat rhetoric. (Bromberger also observes that, throughout 1947, Martinů composed only chamber music.) Last night’s performance perfectly captured the high spirits behind that quartet’s creation; and the outer allegro movements are downright invigorating. Personally, I would look forward to an extended visit by this ensemble devoted to presenting the full canon of Martinů’s quartets.
The Martinů quartet was flanked on either side by the two extremes of the First Viennese School. The opening selection was Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III/75 in G major, the first of his six Opus 76 quartets. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Franz Schubert’s final quartet, D. 887 in G major.
The Haydn selection abounded with the composer’s notoriously high spirits. Last night’s performance gave all of those spirits their proper due. Jarůšek’s cello work was particularly vigorous, and one could practically see the twinkle in his eye as each of his gestures exploded like a firecracker. It was also difficult to overlook his husband-and-wife interplay with Jarůšková’s lead.
D. 887, on the other hand, was epic in its proportions. It is one of the best examples of what Robert Schumann called “Schubert’s heavenly length.” Ironically, the entire quartet also revealed the frantic pace at which its composer often worked. The composition was written in 1826 between June 20 and June 30. For all of that extended duration, however, last night’s performance captured the unrelenting urgency of Schubert’s rhetoric, making for an edge-of-your-seat listening experience. This was late Schubert at its best, leaving most of us leaving the hall still a bit shaken by the intensity of the journey we had just experienced.
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