Festival Music
Pavel Haas Quartet
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
Keith Bruce
four stars
ALTHOUGH their name, honouring their Czech composer countryman who died at Auschwitz, and a vigorous youthful style suggested an affinity for 20th century music, leader Veronika Jaruskova and her colleagues made their first powerful impression at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney playing Beethoven. That UK debut in 2005, a sort of bonus to their victory at the Paolo Borciani competition that year where Sir Peter Maxwell Davies had been a judge, has led to regular appearances in Scotland, including a residency in Glasgow. A few membership changes later, the blend of sound in the group is better than ever, and it can still do urgency and muscle as well as lightness and delicacy on three of the finest works for string quartet in the canon.
There are intimations of mortality in both Schubert’s Rosamunde Quartet, composed four years before his death, and Shostakovich’s Seventh - but then that may true of everything the Russian composer wrote. Quartet No7 is amongst his best known chamber music and as distinctive of his style as the glorious melodious second movement of the Schubert is of his.
The openings of both the first and second movements are all about communication between first violin and cello, with the second violin adding a repeated figure to the latter, and there was a spaciousness and clarity in the quartet’s sound that respected every detail. In the Schubert it was the lightness of touch in the minuet that was breath-catching.
Ravel’s String Quartet was more of an attention-grabbing statement of intent, and as such is a popular challenge for young musicians. The mature Pavel Haas take a very different line through a work where ensemble is all, and some of the most intriguing dialogue was revealed here as being between first violin and viola. The pauses before the second and fourth movements were indicative of a group taking time it would not have allowed itself a decade ago, and an encore of one of Dvorak’s Cypresses was a very gentle and lovely farewell.
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