During this edition, the Festival takes Europe as its starting point with a focus on Central Europe and a particular interest in the musical scene of Czechia. One of the reasons for this is the celebration of 200 years of Bedřich Smetana.
This composer was born in 1824. His operas and primarily his symphonic poem 'Má Vlast - My Homeland', with the section titled The Moldau, are world-renowned, but his chamber music, songs and choral music also deserve wider recognition. For this aspect, there is intensive collaboration with Czech Dreams and with the Czech partner festival Concentus Moraviae.
Jelle Dierickx, artistic director of the Festival van Vlaanderen Mechelen, has extensive knowledge of the musical landscape, from composers to performers. He also has a talent for spotting exceptional talent. He contacted compatriots of Smetana, Leoš Janáček and Josef Suk, who feel deeply connected to the work of these composers. Not just anyone. The Pavel Haas Quartet, named after the Czech composer Pavel Haas, Brno 1899 who was murdered during the Holocaust in 1944 in the German extermination camp Auschwitz, makes an appearance.
The quartet consists of three gentlemen and one lady: Veronika Jarůsková and Marek Zwiebel, violin; Šimon Truszka, viola and Peter Jarůšek, cello. Four top musicians with a unique dynamic, who inspire each other. Their life's work is the transmission of classical works in pursuit of beauty and the sublime in an imaginative visual and auditory flow. They immerse themselves in scores, dive into the sea of notes, engage in dialogue with each other and when the chemistry works, time seems to stand still. The repertoire choice also shows that they are at home in multiple musical worlds. The Czech soul resonates through all three composers, but the listener will also notice their mutual differences.
BBC Music Magazine placed the Pavel Haas Quartet among the ten greatest string quartets of all time and rightly so. They are visiting Mechelen for the first time with a programme entirely dedicated to their homeland Czechia. At the centre is Bedřich Smetana's First String Quartet. Like Beethoven, Smetana had to contend with deafness. It was given the subtitle 'From My Life'.
The programme notes address the dichotomy of whether a composition should be interpreted emotionally or purely technically. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. The three composers anchored their feelings in their compositions in different ways: love for their country, a woman, a lost sense. There is no lack of intensity. In three different compositions, the quartet builds up a mesmerizing tension.
Bedřich Smetana's 'String Quartet No. 1' is described as an autobiographical work that depicts the tinnitus he suffered during his deafness. Thus, in the finale, long-held tones sound, which stand for the whistling tones that heralded his deafness. The composer, already deaf for two years in 1876, called it "a meditation on my life and the catastrophe of complete deafness." A composition with a broad range from silky-smooth sonorous sounds to stormy and tormented. The notes tremble and vibrate. If hearing was gone, vibrations are an alternative. It shows humanity in its vulnerability.
In Leoš Janáček's 'String Quartet No. 2 – Intimate Letters', the composer illustrated the intangible and fascinating play of love in musical love letters. A spicy detail: the 74-year-old Janáček describes his love for Kamila, almost forty years his junior. This results in a bubbling fountain of music that seduces, entices and ignites from beginning to end with rapid alternation of tones on various strings. With technical difficulties for the first soloist with fast, complicated and sometimes stratospheric high tessitura. Veronika Jarůsková masters her instrument flawlessly. Radiates grace while playing. There are also beautiful passages for the viola and cello. The quartet makes the work entirely their own. Fortunately, because if there were only one standardized interpretation of each work, musical life would be deadly dull. They bring a raw clarity and a heartfelt depth to the work with tempi, intensity, phrasing, feeling with which they know how to touch the audience. An instinctive, almost biological necessity of making music.
Josef Suk 'Meditation on the Czech Chorale Saint Wenceslas'. Knowledge of the world constantly changes, partly under the influence of the zeitgeist and political reality. Now only the musicality of this work appeals to us. Suk inspired his composition in 1914 from the old sacred Bohemian Saint Wenceslas hymn. The message of this hymn – a plea for the welfare of the Czech people, directed at their patron saint – was immediately understood by the public. This composition was at the time a form of wordless resistance. Behind the innocently sounding title and calm melody lies a firm statement. The style and interpretation of the Pavel Haas Quartet speaks directly to the heart. Musicians who make an impression. Besides powerful, their approach is also subtle, nuanced, personal and technically virtuosic.
This versatile and layered concert with instrumentalists completely attuned to each other in the beautiful, atmospherically lit Sint-Pieter-en-Paulus Baroque church was a feast for the eyes and ears and received enthusiastic, prolonged and appreciative applause.
- WHAT: Festival van Vlaanderen LUNALIA from 18 April through 5 May
- WHO: Pavel Haas Quartet - Veronika Jarůsková and Marek Zwiebel, violin - Šimon Truszka, viola - Peter Jarůšek, cello.
- PROGRAMME: Bedřich Smetana, Leoš Janáček, Josef Suk
- WHERE & WHEN: Thursday 25 April '24, Sint-Pieter-en-Pauluskerk, Mechelen
- PHOTOS: © Iris Teunissen
