Coming HOME

The energetic and eloquent musicians of the Pavel Haas Quartet are celebrating 20 years of music making with a new recording of Brahms quintets joined by some old friends, as they tell Tom Stewart

You get to meet a lot of string quartets in this job, and it goes without saying that each has its own unique dynamic; but generally, they fall into one of two categories: earnest and businesslike or chatty and excitable. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a group more conclusively in the latter camp than the Pavel Haas Quartet. Listening again to the recording of our interview, some words are difficult to make out as the players finish each other’s sentences, interject with new ideas and, sometimes, begin entirely new conversations among themselves. After more than an hour of this, I put it to the group that they are almost startlingly friendly, and with none of the awkwardness that often accompanies this kind of interaction (I’m at home in the UK, they’re backstage in Brussels, all gathered round a single iPad). ‘I think what you’re trying to say is that we don’t take ourselves too seriously,’ replies violist Luosha Fang, who became the group’s newest member when she joined them in April 2021. ‘But we can still be serious, of course,’ counters founding first violinist Veronika Jarůšková. ‘When we’re on stage we would die for our music.’

Strikingly for a group so brimming with energy, this is the Pavel Haas Quartet’s 20th-anniversary year. Perhaps some of their freshness stems from the sense of renewal that accompanies the arrival of a new member – and six line-up changes across two decades should be enough to keep anyone on their toes. Peter Jarůšek (Jarůšková’s husband) replaced the group’s first cellist soon after the quartet started life; Marek Zwiebel became its third second violinist in 2012 and Fang is the third violist to play with the group since its co-founder Pavel Nikl left in 2016. Nikl makes a return, however, on the group’s new recording of Brahms’s op.111 String Quintet – ‘Like a big brother coming home!’ Jarůšková says. For the coupling, the composer’s op.34 Piano Quintet, they’re joined by Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg, with whom they first played in 2014 – and who is with them on the call from Brussels. ‘We just clicked,’ he says, grinning. ‘The way they lean into every note is the same approach I take in my solo playing. Very often you just have to find a way into how a quartet works and quickly put something together. With them it’s different; I feel very much part of the group. They’re just such warm and lovely people.’ Giltburg’s effusive praise is met with bashful laughter, but it’s clear from their faces that the quartet players consider him one of their own.

‘It was all very hippy-ish at the beginning,’ Jarůšková says, gazing upwards as if recalling a simpler time. ‘I just wanted to have a band, Beatles-style. Today, sometimes all the organising and logistics can make it feel like a real mission.’ Jarůšek, too, is frank about the challenges of quartet life. ‘For us, feelings are the most important things when it comes to the music, but this life isn’t easy and it isn’t for everyone,’ he explains. ‘Very honestly, sometimes I hate it. There have been many moments when I’ve said to myself, “No – this is over.” Concert and travel schedules mean we have to plan our lives two years ahead, but you don’t know what you’ll want to eat in two years’ time, let alone what music you’ll want to play. That’s just how it is, though – this isn’t a job, it’s a life.’

As Jarůšek recalls, the group’s first big success – winning the Vittorio E. Rimbotti competition in Florence in 2004 – meant they had to adjust quickly to a faster pace. ‘We wanted to go because we thought the weather would be nice in Italy at that time of year, and because it would be useful to hear what other groups our age were doing.

Part of the top prize was a long and very busy concert tour; I remember Veronika saying how sorry she felt for whoever ended up winning.’ They were the ones who won, of course, and they weresoon playing more than 40 concerts over just five weeks, at venues across Europe and North America. ‘We didn’t have the repertoire ready for that kind of thing, though, so we were learning music on the road at the same time as figuring out how to survive as a quartet.’

‘WHEN WE’RE ON STAGE WE WOULD DIE FOR OUR MUSIC’

violist Pavel Nikl returned to record Brahms with his former colleagues

The Quartet performs at the 2021 Smetana’s Litomyšl festival

BORIS GILTBURG PHOTO SASHA GUSOV. QUARTET PHOTO FRANTIŠEK RENZA

Another big win followed, at the 2005 Prague Spring competition, after which they came to the attention of Supraphon, the Czech label they still record for today. Their first disc, fittingly, was a recording of music by Haas, the Czech composer who gives the group its name, and by his teacher Janáček. Haas was born in 1899 to a Jewish family in Brno, where Janáček established the city conservatoire in 1919 and became the younger composer’s most significant mentor. Before his death at Auschwitz in 1944, Haas wrote music with the same arresting originality and emotional clarity as Janáček’s, though he was never a prolific composer, and his work, according to Jarůšková, remains somewhat obscure even inside the Czech Republic. The quartet, which must rank among Haas’s greatest champions, settled on the name after hearing a recording of his moving and ebullient Second String Quartet, ‘From the Monkey Mountains’, a work that, in typically idiosyncratic Moravian style, includes a part for percussion. Haas’s music is bright, clear and energetic –a perfect match for the sound and personality of the quartet that now carries his name.

Haas and Janáček (along with their ancestor Dvořák) remain important foundations of the quartet’s repertoire on disc and in concert, but the players don’t consider themselves Czech specialists. ‘It made sense for us to start with these composers, but we also love Beethoven, Shostakovich, Haydn, Schubert – the list goes on,’ Jarůšek says. The Brahms on their latest disc comprises two milestones of the composer’s chamber music: the fiery 1864 Piano Quintet in F minor from his early years in Vienna, and the String Quintet in G major, a touching and autumnal work composed 26 years later, in 1890. Both are big, complex scores that require stamina and – though presumably this presented no difficulties for these players – perfect balance of all five parts. ‘There’s something of a misconception among pianists that piano quintets of this era – Brahms, Schumann, Dvořák, Franck – are mini concertos,’ says Giltburg. ‘They’re actually very well-integrated and balanced pieces, but they’re often played as if this isn’t the case.’

‘IT MADE SENSE FOR US TO START WITH CZECH COMPOSERS, BUT WE ALSO LOVE BEETHOVEN, SHOSTAKOVICH, HAYDN, SCHUBERT, THE LIST GOES ON’

Brahms’s first version of the piece that became the Piano Quintet didn’t even include a piano part at all. He showed the music to his friends Clara Schumann and violinist Joseph Joachim while it was in its original form: a string quintet with two cellos. ‘That was in 1862, when they told him the material needed something stronger to support it, so he rewrote it as a sonata for two pianos,’

Giltburg explains. ‘Then he brought back some of the colour and warmth of the strings – at the beginning of the second movement, for example, the piano has the lullaby melody and the interjections from the strings come like little caresses. You can’t really do that with a second piano. The piano quintet version sounds so natural and obvious to us now – it’s hard to imagine the music any other way.’

Pianist Boris Giltburg plays on the Quartet’s new Brahms recording

Zwiebel also detects hints of other, larger forms at work.‘I think the piece shows him preparing for the First Symphony, which doesn’t come along for another 14 years,’ he says, noting that Brahms’s First String Quartet also did not see publication until eight years after the Piano Quintet. ‘Symphonies, string quartets – these were a big responsibility for a composer, particularly coming so soon after Beethoven.’ Although Brahms was born six years after Beethoven’s death, he described the older composer as ‘that giant whose steps I always hear behind me’.

It seems reasonable that he might well have been intimidated by the huge successes of Beethoven’s orchestral music, finding smaller-scale outlets for landscapes conceived in orchestral terms.

‘I don’t just hear strings and piano when we play this piece,’ Zwiebel continues. ‘There’s a richness that makes me imagine winds and brass in there, too. It makes sense – composers have always used chamber music as a way to explore possibilities and test ideas on a smaller scale.’

In December 1890, Brahms sent a sketch for a string quintet to his publisher with a note that read, ‘With this scrap bid farewell to notes of mine – because it really is time to stop.’

The composer was just 57 at the time, and he didn’t complete his final work, a set of chorale preludes for organ, until 1896, but the four movements for string quartet with an added viola that make up op.111 do represent his final work for strings alone. Brahms is often thought of as a composer who worked within existing parameters, becoming a master of Classical forms and techniques instead of forging out into the unknown. The extent to which this is true is subject to debate, but for Giltburg, there is an assuredness to this string quintet that suggests a composer at the height of his powers. ‘The form becomes so plastic in his hands – he’s in total control, just like Shakespeare is with language,’ he says.

Violist Luosha Fang joined the Pavel HaasQuartet in 2021

LUOSHA FANG PHOTO FRANTIŠEK RENZA. QUARTET PHOTO MARCO BORGGREVE

‘I DON’T JUST HEAR STRINGS AND PIANO WHEN WE PLAY THIS PIECE. THERE’S A RICHNESS THAT MAKES ME IMAGINE WINDS AND BRASS, TOO’

At the Brahms recording sessions, from left: Boris Giltburg, Supraphon producer Matouš Vlčinský, Marek Zwiebel, Veronika Jarůšková, recording engineer Karel Soukeník and Peter Jarůšek

LUKÁŠ KADEŘÁBEK

‘You can feel the years of life experience he’s accumulated in the years since the Piano Quintet,’ Fang adds. ‘I think it’s important to be aware of this –I try not to focus just on the intellectual side of the music, because, at the end of the day, it’s emotions that we’re trying to express.’ From a technical perspective, she suggests, the later work is more challenging on account of its more complex texture. ‘The Piano Quintet is comparatively transparent; you know what each of the voices is doing and which you’re supposed to be paying attention to at any one time. In the String Quintet, every single line is unique and important, but in constantly shifting ways.’ The challenge, she says, is in making each voice shine without overpowering the others – not that this is something new to her: ‘Of course, we violists are diplomats.

From the very beginning we’re trained in how to support others.’On the question of Brahms’s supposed conservatism, Giltburg has an interesting pianistic perspective. ‘His three piano sonatas, which were written in 1852–3, are fiery and completely fearless.

It’s as if they were written by a different Brahms – one who wasn’t thinking much at all about Classical structures and style.’ So what became of this young revolutionary? ‘He never really reappears.

We know the sonatas were well received, but it’s obvious that Brahms loved looking back, too. Maybe he realised this was how he was going to find the greatest means of expression.’ Rather than knocking down walls, in other words, Brahms got to the heart of their foundations and built new work around them.

But, as Fang is quick to point out, none of this is to say that the composer’s music is merely working over old ground. ‘I think you can hear the revolutionary Brahms in the Scherzo of the Piano Quintet,’ she says, referring to the movement’s mercilessforward march. ‘I remember learning it when I was a teenager and just thinking it was so exciting, so full of energy and drive.’

‘OF COURSE, WE VIOLISTS ARE DIPLOMATS. WE’RE TRAINED IN HOW TO SUPPORT OTHERS’ – LUOSHA FANG

As the minutes tick by and lunchtime beckons in Belgium, thoughts turn to what the future holds for the Pavel Haas players. They’re learning music by Martinů and Korngold, but have no plans for a cycle of Beethoven or Shostakovich quartets: ‘Other groups have already done that. We don’t want to turn this great music into work, when really it should be for pleasure,’ Jarůšek says. Jarůšková adds: ‘We’re like marathon runners: we need to stay in the best shape we can, mentally as well as physically – and all without losing curiosity or passion for new things.’ Jarůšek is more sanguine:

‘We’re not at the centre of the universe,’ he says. ‘Nothing would change if we were to quit tomorrow, so we should just enjoy the moment while we can. Your life is getting shorter every day – that’s a fact.’ Jarůšková smiles and shakes her head. ‘I think Peter is hungry!’

The Pavel Haas Quartet’s Brahms album is reviewed on page 87