Rare is the string quartet that suffers no change of personnel. But even a devoted fan can be left wondering what remains of an ensemble after an extended game of musical chairs.
Since its 2011 debut at San Francisco Performances, the Pavel Haas Quartet has returned here half a dozen times — with about as many different violists. Founded in 2002 by first violinist Veronika Jarůšková, the group has had an otherwise stable lineup in cellist Peter Jarůšek (Jarůšková’s husband, who joined in 2004) and second violinist Marek Zwiebel (coming on board in 2012).
Fortunately, judging by its performance on Friday, March 14, at Herbst Theatre — the ensemble’s first San Francisco appearance with violist Šimon Truszka — the characteristics that have made the Pavel Haas Quartet an in-demand group remain intact. The playing was as lively and rhythmically supple as ever. Jarůšková in particular has a way of tossing off the thorniest phrases. Above all, the musicians are adventurous. Other groups play more in tune, but the Pavel Haas Quartet plays with a boldness that both enlivens familiar works and elevates those scores that need a bit of help.
Although Tchaikovsky’s string quartets aren’t much performed today, they had an important early advocate in Ferdinand Laub, a prominent Moscow violinist whose ensemble premiered the first two the composer wrote. The elegy that throbs at the center of the third and final quartet is dedicated to Laub’s memory and contains much of the work’s power. This movement’s melodies, from the wrenching opening unison through to the achingly sweet duets, were among the evening’s many highlights. But it was the seemingly incidental transitional passages that stole the show, Zwiebel’s chantlike droning transforming into a heaving heartbeat that faded as the glassy chords rose.
Two of the other movements are less ambitious, but in this performance, at least they were appealing. The scherzo, eschewing conventional dynamic contouring, sounded comically brutish, like a Roomba on a tear. And if Tchaikovsky’s fortississimo climax and last-minute reminiscence at the end of the fourth movement can seem like a last-ditch effort to bring this music home, the Pavel Haas Quartet’s pacing and charisma nonetheless carried it off.
This was the concert’s grand finale, but in a program of substantial secondary works, Antonín Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 11 in C Major — here in a finely formed interpretation — could easily have shouldered the honor. Dvořák’s finale had all the right rollicking feeling, but before that came gorgeous moments of fragility, particularly in the slow movement’s loping romance. The violins, at first tentative, echoed each other in murmured reassurances. Yet at the height of the tension, the expression retreated as if masked. The figuration wandered until the very end, when it felt lucky to have landed in the home key.
Jarůšková’s gleaming tone decorated the comparatively sanguine first movement, whose opening theme sounds like the first light of day — and like the first notes of Franz Schubert’s famous Cello Quintet. If other composers’ voices occasionally surface here, it’s perhaps because Dvořák had an unusually difficult time writing the work, a major commission whose first performance, he was horrified to read in a Vienna newspaper, would take place scarcely more than a month later. Rushing to finish the score, he borrowed from his own melodic bank and (possibly in response to anti-Czech sentiment abroad) adopted an uncharacteristically classical style.
The Pavel Haas Quartet is more than equipped to handle Dvořák in his less familiar guises, however. The ensemble has performed all 14-plus of his quartets, the first third of which are virtually never played, and made award-winning recordings of works by other Czech composers.
While violist Truszka’s characterizations didn’t penetrate as deeply as those of his colleagues in this performance, that’s understandable — he simply hasn’t been around all that long. With time, he’ll likely gain the self-assurance displayed by the group’s veteran members, one of whom began the encore (“Nature Lies Peaceful in Slumber and Dreaming” from Dvořák’s Cypresses) with a hugely wrong note, then a smile.
