Škampa Quartet – Howard Assembly Room, Leeds

There is nothing quite like Czech music played by Czech musicians – and the Škampa Quartet proved the point. The night after The Cunning Little Vixenfinished its run next door in the Grand, the quartet, after warming up on Mozart, gave us performances of telling intensity in quartets by Janacek and Dvorak.

The Škampa Quartet can claim a direct link with the legendary Smetana Quartet, having been founded in 1989 in Prague, with Milan Škampa of the Smetana Quartet one of the founders.

Mozart, of course, was in at the start of the String Quartet and his No. 21 The Violet reflects perfectly the form that he and Joseph Haydn perfected: the third movement a minuet and trio, the last movement a stylish finale. The Škampa players, with Adela Stajnochrova taking over as first violin from Petra Brabcova, added a little spice to the elegance and all seized on their moments in their spotlight. Already the essence of the string quartet was apparent: the merging of striking individual lines into an integrated whole.

By the 1920s, when Leos Janacek wrote his String Quartet No. 1 as part of that wonderful late flowering of his talent that also produced, among much else, the afore mentionedThe Cunning Little Vixen,the string quartet had developed so that form and inspiration could come from anywhere. This quartet, named The Kreutzer Sonata and inspired by Tolstoy’s work, depicted moments of extreme agony with instrumental virtuosity. The typical third movement began with Brabcova trying to establish a sweetly gentle theme, only for Stajnochrova and viola player Martin Stupka to break in with a phrase of whirling desperation, made more terrifying when Lukas Polak’s magisterial cello joined the mix.

The second half consisted of Antonin Dvorak’s String Quartet No. 13, Opus 106, composed for another legendary quartet, the Bohemian Quartet, when he returned from America. Here we are mid-period in terms of string quartets, Dvorak following the rules: a Scherzo in place of a Minuet (here gloriously animated, more like a Rondo), but darkening and dramatising the material, occasionally breaking into a dance that briefly flourishes, then disappears.

The Škampa produced an intensely idiomatic performance, full of sound contrasts and internal melodies, aggressive and dynamic, with Brabcova spectacular in the first movement and all superbly attentive to every detail of volume and phrasing.

Reviewed on 2nd March 2023.