Idiosyncrasies put to a larger purpose: Smetana and Martinu in EMS concert

Pavel Haas Quartet: multiple award-winner

Identity politics and nationalism — so prominent recently in worldly matters — have left prominent monuments in the arts as well. 

In music, some of this has to do with nationalities that tend to be overshadowed by forces of control, reputation, and the fight for freedom. Central Europe has been a focal point of such cultural and military conflicts for centuries. 

The struggle for self-assertion, as well as preservation of their cultural roots, plays a large role in the lives and careers of two Czech composers played here Wednesday by the Pavel Haas Quartet, a group of Czech musicians conspicuously honored in the outside world, chiefly via the UK's Gramophone magazine.

The Ensemble Music Society presented the group at the Indiana History Center in a program that opened with some late-period Mozart, the String Quartet in B-flat major, K. 589. I was immediately impressed with the bold, almost hard-charging feeling the quartet showed in the first movement. The tone and precision of the players grabbed and held the attention. The angularity and sharp elbows of the "minuet and trio" (third movement) made the most of Mozart's innovations. True, I started to wonder if the performance was maybe too "contrasty" dynamically. But the finale helped demonstrate that this late Mozart quartet was a good choice to match well with the Slavic zest to follow. 

Bohuslav Martinů's Second String Quartet "Concerto da Camera" followed. Among the unusual features of this composer's life is that it began in a village watchtower in east Bohemia. As a child, he had to walk up and down more than 200 steps daily, for music lessons and other activities. The young composer's life  proceeded along a path of wide receptivity to musical influences that never followed a doctrinaire path. This "curiously elusive artist" (The New Grove) turned his back on academic training, was rather intermittently nationalistic, and inclined not to keep track of publication matters (though that lapse was significantly affected by the Nazi blacklist).

This quartet looks backward to early baroque methods of organizing music, yet never shies away from presenting modernist credentials. The Pavel Haas personnel displayed its zestful grasp of the varied material. First violinist Veronika Jaruskova in particular seemed in her element  in the second movement, and her colleagues followed suit. The finale, outsized like a celebration of Czech folk dance, was played with unstinting energy and credible spontaneity.

Earlier in Czech history, but still subject to cultural shifts that at some points validated and others challenged his authenticity, Bedrich Smetana in his First String Quartet makes his life experiences work for him musically, the good and the bad together. The piece is titled "From My Life," and its embedded polkas and inward-looking lyricism require of the performers an extra degree of insight and flexibility. 

Textures change continually and the moods jostle one another. The viola solo at the outset sets a pattern of introspection. By the third movement, the cello gets a solo, and Peter Jarusek dispatched that as commendably as violist Simon Truszka had his at the start. This time the solo heralds a love song, building intensity as it goes.

In the finale, the remarkable climax to the work sketches vividly the onset of Smetana's deafness. A piercing held high note in the first violin, a natural representation of tinnitus, soon yields to more ambiguous passages indicating music as remembered and as experienced in diminished fashion. The quartet evoked the dance forms that Smetana knew so well from his youth onward. This ensemble's performance recalled for me favorably another group's rendition years ago in the Ensemble Music Society's series. At this remove, I'm not inclined to say one was better than the other, but the Pavel Haas Quartet's playing seemed to ascend and remain at the summit of what their national identity has produced at its most personal and most culturally relevant.