Perfect
programming. Haas was one of Janáček’s
most distinguished pupils and chronologically
Haas’s Second Quartet almost exactly
bisects those of his teacher. Supraphon
and the Pavel Haas Quartet have chosen
to contrast the work of the younger
man with Janáček’s Intimate
Letters. This
throws up all manner of fascinating
insights into the creative process and
into Haas’s absorption of the Janáček
sound-world, rhythmic and colouristic.
Haas’s Second Quartet
was written in 1925 and is subtitled
Z Opičích hor [From
the Monkey Mountains], a nickname for
Vysocina, near Brno, in the Moravian
Highlands. It’s written in four movements
and is here played in the version for
percussion (in the finale only) as was
originally
the case in its premiere. It wasn’t
especially well received on its first
performance by the Moravian Quartet
– who as admirers will know were amongst
Janáček’s own interpreters of choice
- and so there is an option to jettison
the percussion part. So far as
I’m aware this is the version generally
preferred in other performances and
recordings.
The movements bear
superscriptions – Landscape; Coach,
Coachman and Horse; The Moon and I;
and Wild Night. The high fiddle writing
and rhythmic patterns are very much
reminiscent of Janáček
But there’s a folk lilt and rather more
explicitly dance-like material than
Janáček would have countenanced
in his own works for the medium. The
opening movement veers between expressive
poles, and encloses a powerful expressive
central section; at ten minutes
it doesn’t lose interest but does flirt
with repetition. The second movement
– marked andante – is pictorial in its
depiction of the coachman and horse,
with the rhythm lurching off-centre,
heaving from side to side. A Moravian
dance whips things up before some warm
unison writing contrasts with it.
The slow movement (The
Moon and I), whilst it sounds as
if it could be rather descriptive in
the manner of Novák’s superbly
romanticised piano works, actually develops
a pronounced sensual lyricism. But
Janáček is never far off and those
chugging rhythms arrive to force a fiercely
controlled climax of real power – and
then a return to the lyricism of the
opening. It’s the finale that caused
the Brno consternation I suppose. Wild
sonorities and heavily emphatic
rhythmic drive predict another Moravian
dance. But this time it’s accompanied
by the modish call of the percussion
– and a fullish kit from the sound of
it, played by Colin Currie. There are
hints in its rhythmic patterns of ragtime
and early, rather staid jazz. Outbursts
are grandiloquent, and exciting. The
quartet follows its alternating lyrical
and dramatic Janáček-derived
outbursts with the percussion adding
colour, contemporary outrage and a veritable
kick. Eighty years ago this was badly
received even by the performers; after
the premiere the Moravians only ever
played the quartet version.
This is an exciting
and driving performance, fully aware
of the lineage and stylistic inheritance
to which Haas was heir but also paying
due heed to his youthful verve and playfully
subversive originality.
Listening to their
Intimate Letters, before I’d
read the quartet’s biography in the
booklet, I was convinced they’d listened
to performances by the Smetana Quartet.
They have in fact worked regularly with
Milan Škampa, legendary violist of the
group – and he actually contributes
a booklet note on the Janáček
quartet. The curve of the performance
is reminiscent of the later group –
say the mid-seventies incarnation –
though the Pavel Haas takes the finale
significantly slower. Their concentration
on elegance and control of contour is
admirable and if I find
them somewhat lacking in intensity in
the slow movement, doubtless that will
come with time. Janáček always
praised the Moravian Quartet for playing
his music with fearless passion. He
might have found the present performance
strong on rhythmic attacks but
a little light on the intimacy and emotion.
With
a warmly balanced recording in the Domovina
studios and pretty good notes this is
an acutely selected example of Moravian
sons and heirs. If you thought that
the Janáček quartets were a beginning
and an end in themselves then
Haas gives one an example of how younger
composers took him as a compositional
model – and how far, or how little,
they truly succeeded in absorbing his
sound-world.
Jonathan Woolf
Pavel Haas Quartet 
