EIF: Pavel Haas Quartet

Queen’s Hall - 23/08/22

The eagerly-awaited and very well-attended Queen’s Hall midday recital on 23rd August presented the Pavel Haas Quartet in a programme of masterworks by Haydn, Martinů and Schubert.

The recital opened with the first of Haydn’s last completed set of 6 string quartets, Op.76.  Nominally in G major, Haydn makes frequent excursions into the minor and other keys and the music is playfully inventive, mixing folk influences with ingenious counterpoint and colour.  From the off, the musicians captured and matched this playfulness with flawless mutually responsive phrasing, teasing use of tenuto and rubato, perfect balance and control of dynamics, reminding the full rapt Queen’s Hall audience of why this group is revered as one of the very finest string quartets performing at present.  The hushed hymn-like mezza voce opening of the C-major Adagio sostenuto was magical, the effect enhanced by the sparing use of vibrato.  The rhapsodic solo violin melody then unfolded with surpassing beauty.  The whimsy of the quirky Presto minuet-that-is-no-minuet, with its bizarre 10- and 11-bar phrase-lengths and sudden fortissimo quaver bursts was quite delicious, surpassed only by the tongue-in-cheek sweetness of the trio with another first violin rhapsody over pizzicato accompaniment, and the cheekiest rubato.  The stern unison G minor opening to the finale is usually played forte (and when I got home, it is certainly marked thus in my Edition Peters) but it was played mezzo-piano, endowing it with a sense of brooding menace, so when the scurrying triplet melody set off in the relative major B-flat, it felt like an escape to sunlit liberty.  Haydn celebrates this liberty in the development with an excursion through the colour chart of keys, like cloud shadows.  After a brief sweet flirtation with D-major, G-major sunshine reasserts itself for the coda, with the same cheeky scoring as the trio.  Superb playing of Haydn at the height of his powers.

Martinů’s 3-movement Seventh and last String Quartet, subtitled ‘Concerto da Camera’ is a fusion of neo-classical form (perhaps influenced by Stravinsky’s ‘Dumbarton Oaks’) and his individual voice and style with their rich shifting major harmonies, rhythmic drive and syncopation, but also lyricism and tenderness, especially in the slow second movement, where he seems to channel Dvořák in yearning for a return to his Czech homeland.  The outer movements are optimistic and playfully rhythmic and bowl along with a genial humour and momentum.  After the unforgettable experience of hearing the Pavel Haas Quartet play Janáček’s ‘Intimate Letters’ at the East Neuk Festival, they were already my go-to group for performance of Janáček; now also for Martinů.

If the Haydn Op.76 No.1 is “nominally in G-major”, Schubert’s D887, his final essay in the genre, plays out his inner emotional turmoil through a struggle for uneasy coexistence between G-major and G-minor, in music of great emotional intensity that is permeated by a sense of melancholy frailty and a typically late Schubertian preoccupation with lost innocence.  Also typically Schubertian is the ability to infuse a major-key phrase with as much pathos as if it were in the minor.  Tremolo passages seem to communicate a sense of dread.  Oblique major-key references to Beethoven, whom Schubert worshipped, seem to suggest admiration and a little envy for one whom Schubert perhaps believed had triumphed over his demons, while reluctant to ‘own’ such strength himself.  For example, the untroubled trio section of the otherwise anxious scherzo seems to quote the main theme of the first movement of Beethoven’s Op.127, while Schubert’s dancelike finale seems to refer to that of Beethoven’s Op.18 No.3.  

The Pavel Haas Quartet, as indeed with all the programme, got “under the skin” of this deeply troubled music and remained “in the zone” to reveal its haunting beauty transcending its traumatic underlying narrative.  The experience was as profoundly moving as it was cathartic.  In a Festival that has already delivered so many unforgettable musical experiences this year, this recital ranks as a (if not ‘the’) supreme highlight.

Cover photo: Ryan Buchanan

Donal Hurley

Donal Hurley is an Irish-born retired teacher of Maths and Physics, based in Clackmannanshire. His lifelong passions are languages and music. He plays violin and cello, composes and sings bass in Clackmannanshire Choral Society, of which he is the Publicity Officer.

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An Afternoon at the Opera

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EIF: RSNO: Mahler’s Third Symphony