Grade: A
Bohuslav Martinu was a patchy composer; worse, he was also a prolific one, meaning that if you dip into his music at random you never quite know if you’re going to have your day made, or just half an hour wasted. Ideally, you need someone to do the choosing for you, and praise be, here’s one of today’s brightest and best chamber ensembles doing exactly that.
Seriously: listen to one of the big-name string quartets of the CD era – the Alban Berg Quartet, say, or the Emersons – and ask yourself, hand on heart, whether the Pavel Haas Quartet doesn’t play the socks off them. The vitality, the intelligence; the headlong, needle-point virtuosity: all this is a wholly 21st-century phenomenon and there’s no finer proof than this new release. True, it’s not a comprehensive survey, and all the better for it.
Instead, we get snapshots of Martinu across two decades – from the spiky, syncopated provocateur in 1920s Paris to the exile in postwar America, bouncing with neoclassical optimism in the brief period before it dawned upon him that he would never be going home.
And then there’s the volcanic Fifth Quartet of 1938, possibly inspired by the darkening international situation, but more probably – tut! tut! – by Martinu’s brief (but by all accounts torrid) affair with the composer Vitezslava Kapralova. Take your pick: in this uncompromising performance, the PHQ make the case that in this one work, at least, Martinu belongs up there with Bartok, Janacek and Shostakovich in the pantheon of great 20th-century quartet composers.
If you only own one recording of Martinu’s chamber music… well, you get the picture.
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