Janacek: String Quartet nr. 1 "Kreutzer Sonata"

The only quartet (and indeed the only serious piece of music) I've heard over the last week is Janacek's First Quartet, after Tolstoy's novella Kreutzer Sonata, from 1923. It's a challenging work from the mature Janacek who allegedly wrote it down in an astonishing nine days.

There was a time when I regularly listened to this work, likely because I was then very much under the influence of that very same novella. But now it had been languishing for many years in one of the darker corners of my CD cupboard. Another rediscovery in my quartet survey, therefore ...

I started with a recording by the Alban Berg Quartet, a live performance from 1993 (part of a 3CD box with a sample of 20th century works in the Quartet's repertoire). An annoying experience. It felt like Janacek's Moravian passion didn't square with the Teutonic rigidity of the ABQ. They tried hard but the whole thing felt artificial and stilted. Then I switched to a disc with the Stamitz Quartet that was part of a survey of Czech quartets issued by Brilliant Classics. A less experienced ensemble but the playing is energetic, down to earth and colourful and the sound very good. However, after four or five auditions of this version I suddenly tired of it. Janacek's expressionistic histrionics got on my nerves.

Today, after a break of a couple of days, I listened to the version of the Pavel Haas Quartet (on Supraphon), which just came in with an Amazon delivery. And indeed, it is a reading that does the stellar reputation of this young quartet honour. First of all, the Haas take a more leisurely approach to the score. Their total timing adds up to almost 19 minutes, whilst almost 2 minutes slower than the Berg (and even more compared to the quicker Stamitz). It may not seem like much, but it makes a lot of difference in terms of letting the music breath. It's a story that is being told, after all. And the narrator shouldn't get out of breath. I haven't seen any kind of formal analysis of this work but it strikes me as fairly disjointed. I may be mistaken but there does not seem to be a compelling musical logic that ties these four disparate movements together. It's a narrative backbone that follows the storyline outlined by Tolstoy. In the booklet that goes with the Supraphon it is told as follows (by Jiri Benes):

The four-movement composition is at once Janacek's most compact and most tragic musical drama. The story begins to unfold in the first section with the fate motif (a rising fourth with an added second, one of the building blocks of Janacek's musical vocabulary) and the passionately melodic theme of the heroine; in the second, the fateful encounter takes place, an experience continually broken up by the basic dance character of the scherzo movement. The romantic events of the third movement with its intertwining two-voice canon are interrupted before their fervent and yet severe climax by the entrance of a foreign element, and continue after a supremely violent scene - only as a monologue now, but still more heartfelt - as a remininscence. The Finale begins with three recitative meditations on the fate motif, and then with the entrance of the allegro moves through a brisk, mounting series of passionate love scenes to its climax and unstoppable catastrophe: Janacek's version of Dvorak's characteristic motif from the Requiem appears in the double shrieks of the viola as a representation of death, tragically and definitively confirmed here by the fate theme. In the shadow of its finality, however, the well-known reprise begins, carrying all the contradictory ideas of the movement in one stirring stream to a monumental catharsis, to a statement of faith in man and his moral strength.

 Clearly, this music is all about 'interruptions', 'contradictions' and things that are 'broken up'. The fate motif figures as a ghostly motto theme. The point I want to make is that apparently it seems difficult for an quartet ensemble to bring this violent thematic montage to life in a compelling, satisfactory way. This lack of inner logic bedeviled, in my opinion, the ABQ recording, and, to a lesser degree also the reading by the Stamitz Quartet. In hearing the Haas Quartet, I have an immediate experience of coherence, of things fitting together in a plausible way. The slower tempo will have a lot to do with it. But the playing itself is also imaginative and wonderfully affectionate. Nothing of the mannerisms characteristic of the ABQ. Just listen to the opening of the quartet, with the rising, questioning motif played unisono by the whole quartet and an irregular, parlando response by consecutively the cello, the viola and the second violin. The ABQ play the solo responses with plenty of accents and ritardandos. It sounds clever, but not musical. With the Haas, the phrase sings in the most natural and unaffected manner. It is more 'simple' but also so much more characterful than what the Viennese dish out. And that sets the tone for the whole work. There is a pervasive groundedness in the music making that, I assume, will never make us tire from it. To be sure, the Haas to do not shirk the expressionistic excesses embedded in the score, but in terms of astringent sound effects and dynamic contrasts. But they do not sound like 'effects', but are an organic part of the musical fabric.

Anyway, these are just my first impressions and I look very much forward to listening to the other works recorded by this fine quartet.