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Pavel Haas Quartet: Veronika Jarusková vln, Marek Zwiebel vln
Pavel Nikl vla, Peter Jarusek vc
Danjulo Ishizaka vc
Supraphon 4110-2, 2013 (2 CDs: 92 minutes), $28
CD Reviews
The chamber music Schubert composed in the last four years of his life collectively represents one of the great creative achievements of Western culture. Academic criticism and analysis are currently teeming around this repertoire, with a number of recent and forthcoming books and articles engaging what we are increasingly pleased to call 'late Schubert'. It seems as though we have woken up to the sense that there is more to Schubert's instrumental music than 'heavenly length', and that the compositions of 1824-28 (the years encompassing 'Schubert's Beethoven Project', in John Gingerich's influential formulation) hold much for the twenty-first-century mind to contemplate. When we listen to Schubert these days we are more likely to listen for deep traces of the human condition - yearning memory, psychological exile, existential angst - rather than buoyant lyricism or Viennese Gemütlichkeit.
The Pavel Haas Quartet, named in honour of the Czech composer who composed music while interred at Theresienstadt and who was later murdered at Auschwitz, seems founded on the idea of a courageous high-stakes engagement with music. Thus they are well placed to introduce listeners to a newer, darker Schubert. Their ambitious recording of Schubert has already been celebrated with a brace of enthusiastic reviews as well as the 2014 Gramophone Award for Chamber Music.
Few pieces project dark intensity as immediately as Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, D. 810, known as the 'Death and the Maiden' Quartet. It opens with a defiant speech act, two terse phrases usually performed with implacable ferocity, as though by the jaws of death. The Haas players do not bite the endings off, as so many other quartets do, but rather make of this opening something perhaps even more sinister. By deploying a more deliberate tempo and emphasizing the insistent D's of the outer voices, they create a less impassioned, but more consequential sound. The hollowness of the opening is emphasized: amid the roar of three octaves of D, Schubert establishes D minor with two swift stepwise utterances that complete a bleakly linear cadential progression (i to iv, then V to i).
Schubert...