The Pavel Haas Quartet travel to Australia

Pavel Haas Quartet  and Colin Currie  perform a world première, Alexander Goehr's Since Brass nor Stone...  Fantasia for string quartet and percussion Op.80  at the  City of London Festival

Thursday 10 July 2008
St Andrew's Church, Holborn

Pavel Haas Quartet
Colin Currie percussion

Programme:

Notes from the programme:

Peter Maxwell Davies' Sad Paven is based on Thomas Tomkin's keyboard work of the same name. In 1646 Oliver Cromwell's parlimentary army entered the city of Worcester, where Tomkin's was cathedral choirmaster and organist: the choir was disbanded, the organ dismantled and Tomkins out of a job. Three centuries later, war was to have more tragic consequences for for Pavel Haas. A Moravian-Czech Jew, Haas was sent by the occupying Nazis to Theresienstadt concentration camp, and later died in Auschwitz. Theresienstadt was set up as a propagandist showcase for the creative arts: a film survives of Haas, who had been Janácek's outstanding pupil, taking a bow after a performance there of his Study for String Orchestra. His second quartet, composed in happier times in 1925, was inspired by the mountains near his native city of Brno, and features a percussionist in its dance-like finale.

Alexander Goehr's new work has been specially commissioned for this unusual combination, as the composer explains: "Since Brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea... The opening line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 65 not only offers a title... but each of the four elements - brass, stone, earth and the boundless sea - are also points of reference for the sound-world present in a percussion refrain. In essence, the music is a succession of fugal inventions in a number of sections which run continuously together with a solo percussion part of considerable virtuosity." The composer has dedicated this work to the memory of Pavel Haas and his colleagues.

Click on the link below to hear Colin Currie and Peter Jarusek, cellist with the Pavel Haas Quartet, discussing the evening's performance:

Reviews:

"Apropos a debate raging in this newspaper, new classical music seems to be alive, well and, in many cases, none too hard to love. On the final evening of the City of London festival, St Andrew church in Holborn hosted a rewarding early programme by the rising Pavel Haas Quartet and percussionist Colin Currie. At its centre was the premiere of Since Brass, Nor Stone ... by Alexander Goehr, a 12-minute movement evoking the metallic, earthy and fluid imagery in Shakespeare's Sonnet No 65. In the most lyrical of his dance-like episodes, Goehr writes a melody that almost fits the text - but rather than being sung, it is played on a glockenspiel, ear-splittingly high yet buoyed by the strings. The sound-world is glossy, glinting and individual.

The Quartet No 2, by Pavel Haas, which brings drums into its rumbustious finale, made an apt counterpart. Haas, who died in Auschwitz, was Janacek's star pupil, and his music has the buzzing textures and joyful melodic invention of his teacher."
The Guardian, 5 stars

"The Pavel Haas Quartet, one of the world's best young string quartets... In their final programme at St Andrew's Church, Holborn, not a hair of a note was out of place; nor was the playing limply beautiful. When Maxwell Davies needed sorrow and anger for A Sad Paven for These Distracted Times, out they poured. And in their namesake's second quartet, From the Monkey Mountain, its folk rhythms shone incandescent.

Still, it was the new piece by Alexander Goehr that really made this concert. Goehr's music can be overstudious, but there was nothing bookish about Since Brass, nor Stone for quartet and percussion (the excellent Colin Currie), composed in memory of Haas and fellow musicians in the Nazi camps. For some 15 minutes strings surged ahead in deliciously hiccupping fugal patterns overlaid with intricate, delicate percussion. The Haas includes percussion, but only to highlight the string textures; Goehr's achievement is to fuse his sound sources into a magical garden of dappled textures. This is music that delights the ear, stimulates the brain and moves the heart: what more can a listener want?"
The Times

"Schoenberg and co begat Boulez and co, but where were the successors to Bartok and Janacek? Incinerated in Auschwitz in 1944: Hans Krasa, Viktor Ullmann and Pavel Haas were the pre-eminent voices of Czech music in the Twenties and Thirties, and their disappearance left a gaping void in musical history.

Haas's String Quartet No 2, composed 10 years before he was swept up into the Nazi nightmare, has the dreaminess of Janacek and the pared-down, angular beauty of Bartok, and it stands as an ineffably sad monument to the greater music he might have gone on to write. To hear it played in St Andrew Holborn Church by the Pavel Haas Quartet, with its recently rediscovered percussion part added by percussionist Colin Currie, was a rare privilege; Haas's evocation of country sounds and the rhythms of village life was beautifully rendered.

But the audience that packed this concert had primarily come to hear Peter Maxwell Davies' reworking of a Thomas Tomkins piece, A Sad Paven for these Distracted Tymes, and to celebrate the premiere of a work by Alexander Goehr. The Sad Paven was a powerful and densely worked miniature, which began with bleached viol textures and then did a Bartok on them.

Goehr's piece was gnomically entitled Since Brass, nor Stone... Fantasia for string quartet and percussion Op 80, and seemed at first an odd melding, with the percussion going one way, while the strings went their own darker way. Yet this apparent dislocation actually cohered: ending interrogatively mid-phrase, it had an introverted, gritty beauty."
The Independent, 5 stars

"..[This] concert was given by the young Pavel Haas Quartet in the church of St Andrew, Holborn, and brought the premiere of Alexander Goehr’s Since Brass, nor Stone . . . , a one-movement “fantasia” for another irregular combination: string quartet and percussion. This one was a triumph of the unlikely. Goehr’s imagination, sparked off by a Shakespeare sonnet, fuses the disparate sound-worlds with a rigorous, toccata-like brilliance. The score reveals that some of the words are “set” for glockenspiel. The performance with Colin Currie was enthralling."
Sunday Times

• City of London Festival

• BBC New Generation Artists

• Royal Philharmonic Society