Album: Martinů: String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 5 & 7
Artists: Pavel Haas Quartet — Veronika Jarůšková, Marek Zwiebel, Šimon Truszka, Peter Jarůšek
Label: Supraphon (SU 4368-2)
Release date: 19 September 2025
Recording: Domovina Studio, Prague (April–May 2024)
Total time: 84:40
Available on all streaming platforms
A four-part portrait of Martinů’s inner world
By Damián Autorino
Editor at Moto Perpetuo
The Pavel Haas Quartet returns with a project that revisits one of the pillars of Czech modernism. Their new album for Supraphon gathers four of Bohuslav Martinů’s string quartets — Nos. 2, 3, 5, and 7 — a selection that spans more than two decades of the composer’s creative life and reveals the evolution of his musical language from rhythmic experimentation to expressive lyricism.
The new album also extends Supraphon’s long-standing commitment to Martinů’s chamber music. More than four decades after the label’s legendary complete cycle recorded by the Panocha Quartet, the Pavel Haas Quartet now offers a new perspective on four of these works — equally rooted in Czech tradition yet unmistakably their own.
Rather than following a chronological order, the ensemble presents these works as “four distinct worlds that resonate with each other.” The early Second Quartet (1925) bursts with youthful drive and sharp contrasts, while the Third (1929) explores daring harmonies and structural freedom that place Martinů at the forefront of European modernism. The Fifth Quartet (1938), composed in Paris and dedicated to Vítězslava Kaprálová, bears the marks of emotional turbulence and personal upheaval — a musical confession of love and despair. The Seventh Quartet (1947), written in New York and dedicated to his wife Charlotte, closes the selection with radiant serenity and a renewed sense of tonal clarity, as if the composer had finally found inner balance after years of exile and uncertainty.
Throughout the album, the Pavel Haas Quartet performs with their characteristic intensity and precision. The ensemble’s rhythmic vitality — a hallmark of Martinů’s idiom — reaches moments of breathtaking energy in the fast movements, yet always within a framework of clarity and control. In the slower sections, the players reveal the music’s introspective side, where rhythmic pulse gives way to human warmth and quiet intimacy.
Supraphon’s engineering captures every detail of this balance: the burnished sonority, the dialogue between instruments, and the ensemble’s almost orchestral sense of color. The result is a recording that feels both expansive and immediate — a living sound that mirrors Martinů’s own fusion of modern pulse and Bohemian lyricism.
These quartets, still too seldom programmed or recorded, emerge here as essential works in the 20th-century quartet repertoire, standing alongside those of Bartók, Janáček, and Shostakovich. One can only hope that the Pavel Haas Quartet will continue this journey and eventually record the complete cycle.
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