Pavel Haas Quartet delivers eloquent performance

PAVEL HAAS QUARTET, Libby Gardner Concert Hall, University of Utah, Nov. 10

The Prague-based Pavel Haas Quartet is still a rather young group, but the four members play as if they've been together for much longer than just a few short years. They are like-minded players who each bring a lot to the table: impeccable technique, impressive musicality and perceptive interpretations into which they pour a good dose of feelings and emotions.

On tour in the United States currently, the foursome stopped in Libby Gardner Concert Hall on Tuesday, thanks to the Chamber Music Society of Salt Lake City. The quartet played a program that included a work by the group's namesake, the Czech composer Pavel Haas, who met his death in Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of 45.

Haas didn't leave behind a large body of works, but among them are three string quartets, which the Pavel Haas Quartet has recorded.

At Tuesday's concert, the group played Haas' Second Quartet, an incredibly heartfelt and personal musical journey. Even though Leos Janacek's influence is readily evident in the work's motivic cells and in the manner in which they are developed, as well as in the harmonic language, the quartet is nevertheless very original and compelling.

The foursome gave a powerful reading that captured the colors and nuances of the score vividly and dramatically. The work opens with an evocative movement that has an otherworldliness to it that the group brought out with their wonderfully expressive playing. But while in fact the entire work is mystical, it's the slow third movement that lies at its core. It's highly charged emotionally; the music is reflective and driven by an inner power, and it was given a mesmerizing reading that was poetic and flowed with long fluid lines.

The concert opened with Benjamin Britten's early "Three Divertimenti." It was played with well defined understanding and captured the pieces' youthfulness and impetuous character.

Rounding out the program was Ludwig van Beethoven's Quartet in F major, Op. 59, No. 1, one of the so-called "Razumovsky Quartets."

Once again, the Pavel Haas Quartet showed what it was capable of in terms of interpretation. They brought insight to their reading, and their playing was subtly nuanced and wonderfully expressive.

Their playing had a forceful boldness to it in the outer movements that captured the robustness of the music, but it was their account of the slow movement, which they played with eloquent expressiveness, that was the highlight of this performance.

e-mail: ereichel@desnews.com