Concerted Reality

From the Classical Vault: These anniversaries can be tedious, but I, at least, find it interesting to see what I was doing on this date in a year that is something-divisible-by-five years ago. In this case it’s 35 years, the venue was Union College’s Memorial Chapel, and the performers I reviewed were the Prague String Quartet, an ensemble founded in 1955 by violinist Břetislav Novotný, who had been part of the just-disbanded Prague Quartet. Novotný died in 2019 at the age of 95. I can’t find any reference to current activity by the quartet, so I suspect it, too, is gone.

                                                                                         

IT WORRIES ME THAT THE RECORDING has become a standard by which performing groups are judged, forcing upon them a standard created in the artificial environment of a studio that lacks the excitement of audience interaction.

Another worry is that the recording has lulled the listener into a too-passive mode, allowing the music to drift into the background while some other activity is carried on.

Both worries were supported by Saturday night’s concert by the Prague String Quartet which, with guest pianist Gloria Saarinen, performed at Union College’s Memorial Chapel.

The two big pieces on the program were by Czech composers, certainly the group’s strong area. The Quartet No. 2 by Janáček, subtitled “Intimate Letters,” brought my first worry into play. The ensemble explored the four-movement work with an energy and intensity that made the most of the fragmented moodiness of Janáček’s work. But they did so with enough abandon to result in less-than-perfect playing. Is this a drawback?Not when the result is so effective. Violist Lubomir Maly is given prominence throughout much of the piece, and played with icy passion.

Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81, brought Saarinen out to join the quartet; here is where the second worry came in. They played well, but without the collaborative energy the work requires. Piano and strings didn't seem to share the same ideas at key moments.

They were adequate where superlatives were required: this is their music, and we count on them to deliver Dvořák better than anyone else.

But there wasn't the kind of energy in the house to support that kind of exchange, and it is an exchange, the excitement that distinguishes a play from a movie and a recital from a recording.

Things did get off to a bang-up start with a quartet by Haydn, his Op. 54 No. 2 in C Major. It’s a violin concerto with trio accompaniment, and showed off the skills of founder-first violinist Břetislav Novotný admirably.

Each of the players demonstrated soloist-quality skills at one time or another in the course of the concert, so the faults of the end of the concert can’t be blamed on technical problems.

Perhaps it’s Dvořák’s music that’s tricky. He writes long, gorgeous and thoroughly Bohemian melodies, but he also constructs his music with a dramatist’s sense of timing. By the time you reach a Dvořák finale, you’re half drunk and dancing a crazy furiant.

It’s important, therefore, to marshal your progress as you play one of his pieces; the Prague ensemble was a little too generous in offering us their musical magic right off the bat – they had no place left to go.

– Schenectady Gazette, 2 February 1987