Music review: Pavel Haas Quartet
Pavel Haas Quartet *****
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
That sincerity was there in an immaculate Fratres by Arvo Pärt, with cellist Peter Jarůšek’s immovable pizzicatos matched by movingly glassy harmonies from the other players. It was there, too, in a harrowing Schubert G major Quartet, D887, which stared coldly at the desperation behind the composer’s heartbreaking lyricism, in violist Radim Sedmidubský’s nastily scrubbed repeated-note figurations in the scherzo, for example, or the turbulence of a closing movement of truly orchestral richness.
The evening’s highlight, however, was a blistering account of Bartók’s Fifth Quartet – eerily evocative in its night-music textures; whirling to its out-of-kilter Hungarian dance rhythms; and fearsome in the sheer might of its sonorous climaxes. “Wow,” went a few inadvertent mutterings from audience members, even after just the seething opening movement. Wow indeed.