Pavel Haas Quartet and Boris Giltburg

Josef Suk – Meditation on the Old Czech Chorale “Saint Wenceslas”, Op. 35a
Pavel Haas – String Quartet No. 3, Op. 15
Antonín Dvořák – Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81

 

The world-famous Haas Quartet has been a regular guest of the Janáček Brno Festival for several years, and this year they will perform the Piano Quartet by Antonín Dvořák alongside quartet works by Josef Suk and Pavel Haas. 

Josef Suk (1874–1935) embodied patriotic appeal in the year of the outbreak of the First World War in his composition Meditation on the Old Czech Chorale “St. Wenceslas”. The composition was the flagship of the world-famous Bohemian Quartet, of which Josef Suk was a member, and soon toured almost all of Europe. A work of immense fragility and remarkable sonority, it is still one of Suk’s most performed chamber works.

String quartets occupy an important place in the sparse oeuvre of Pavel Haas (1899–1944). Perhaps Janáček’s most gifted pupil wrote his third string quartet in 1937–38. It is a work that was composed in a happier period of the composer’s life, when the Haas couple had their daughter Olga and when he began to celebrate success with his work. But the international situation was worsening, and Nazi Germany was making itself more and more known. The Third String Quartet is one of Haas’ finest works, but it already reflects a sense of the national and personal tragedy of the following years.

The Piano Quartet in E flat major is the second and last work by Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) for this instrumentation. He wrote it at the height of his creative powers during the summer holidays of 1889 at the urging of the Berlin publisher Simrock. It is a supreme work in which Dvořák’s mastery of form is clearly evident, and in which he has put distinctive, original content. 

Jiří Zahrádka