Pavel Haas Quartet

The brilliant, Technicolor recordings of the Pavel Haas Quartet have won it an impressive array of awards since its inception in 2002. More will surely follow for this latest excursion into the works of Dvo ák. The playing is breathtakingly good, each performer maintaining their own personality and yet working together to conjure a special magic, whether in the sparkling furiant of the piano quintet No 2 in A major, Op 81 (with Boris Giltburg at his most mercurial), or the dreamy, song-like opening movement of the string quintet in E flat major, Op 97, redolent of the wide-open spaces of rural Iowa.

Resonus is pleased to present this significant new recording of vocal works by the early-twentieth century Czech composer, Pavel Haas.

Their recording of the "American" Quartet and String Quartet No. 13, Op. 106, elevated the Pavel Haas Quartet among the finest performers of Antonín Dvořák's music.

The composers whose music is featured on the present album lived and worked in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, and their fates were afflicted by the monstrous Nazi regime. Viktor Ullmann, who before WWII held the post of Kapellmeister at the New German Theatre, wrote Quartet no.3 while he was detained at the Theresienstadt ghetto-camp. Hans Krása completed the Theme and Variations in 1936, yet he only saw it performed in Theresienstadt, along with his children’s opera Brundibár. Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces reveal his zest for rhythm and dance, as well as his evidently having been inspired by the music of the Viennese salons, Italy and Spain. Pavel Haas’s Quartet no.2, dating from 1925, serves as vivid proof of the claim that the composer was the most gifted pupil of Leoš Janáček.

While the concept of the programmatic and autobiographical quartet seems to have been introduced by Beethoven, nowhere has it been taken up more forcefully than in the Czech lands, as the works presented here attest.

This new release presents two major works by the American composer, David Post, his Concertino á Cinque for clarinet and string quartet, and his Piano Quintet for piano and string quartet, both works heard in virtuosic performances by the Martinu Quartet, with clarinetist Ludmila Peterková and pianist Jan Dušek.

While the concept of the programmatic and autobiographical quartet seems to have been introduced by Beethoven, nowhere has it been taken up more forcefully than in the Czech lands, as the works presented here attest.

The composers whose music is featured on the present album lived and worked in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, and their fates were afflicted by the monstrous Nazi regime. Viktor Ullmann, who before WWII held the post of Kapellmeister at the New German Theatre, wrote Quartet no.3 while he was detained at the Theresienstadt ghetto-camp. Hans Krása completed the Theme and Variations in 1936, yet he only saw it performed in Theresienstadt, along with his children’s opera Brundibár. Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces reveal his zest for rhythm and dance, as well as his evidently having been inspired by the music of the Viennese salons, Italy and Spain. Pavel Haas’s Quartet no.2, dating from 1925, serves as vivid proof of the claim that the composer was the most gifted pupil of Leoš Janáček.

The Kocian Quartet has earned the reputation as one of the foremost Czech string quartets of its time. Its repertory is broad, encompassing standards by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as mainstream Czech works by Dvorák, Smetana, Janácek, and Martinu, and little-known fare by Pavel Haas and Hans Krása. But it has also introduced many new works by an array of contemporary Czech composers, including Tichy, Loudova, Kaslik, Kubicka, Riedelbauch, and conductor/composer Rafael Kubelik.