These troubled times make music all the more important. So here are the Pavel Haas Quartet at the Janáček festival in Brno a few days ago. Immensely enjoyable. They play Martinu’s 7th Quartet (starting at 2.15); Janáček’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ Quartet (at 27.30); and Dvořák’s String Quintet No. 3 (at 53.30). These are characteristically fine performances, and well filmed too. The PHQ were asked by John Gilhooly of Wigmore Hall to do a Martinu cycle, and were planning to perform the first two concerts there later this month; but those concerts are now postponed because of covid travel restrictions.
Followers of the quartet’s fortunes will know that Jiří Kabát parted abruptly from the quartet at the beginning of the year. So their violist for the few concerts they have been able to play since, not straying far from Prague, has again (temporarily?) been their founder member Pavel Nikl who so sadly had to leave the quartet for family reasons a few years ago. I think the additional player for the Quintet is the violist of the Zemlinsky Quartet.
Added: Sad to relate, the video did not stay online for very long. I hope other PHQ fans also took the chance to see it/download it.
Thank you so much for sharing this concert. I share your admiration (and concern) for the Pavel Haas Quartet since discovering their Supraphon recordings of works by Haas and Janáček (one of them a Gramaphone award winner, if memory serves).
And since i haven’t had a chance to say it before: *thank you* for all the valuable material you share on this site, both in your journal writings and in the texts you make available. They are a great gift to learners and lovers of mathematics.
I hope you and yours are all doing as well as can be expected during these extraordinary times.
Thanks for this! Extraordinary times indeed …