I’d have thought that by now all of the projects cancelled by lockdown would have either been completed or binned. Not so. Fife's East Neuk Festival had planned to bring the Belfiato Wind Quintet from the Czech Republic back in the summer of 2020, but hadn't been able to reschedule it in the intervening years. They finally made it this year, though, and along with their compatriots in the Pavel Haas Quartet, they played as part of the festival’s Czech Night, a celebration of music by Haas, Janáček, Suk and Smetana. This is clearly music that’s clearly special to them, because they lavished care on it, illuminating textures and investing them with some of the quality of the human voice to which winds can sound so close.
Jiří Javůrek’s dark, swirling clarinet tone curled through the lines of Haas’ Wind Quintet in a way that sounded completely seductive, while Kateřina Javůrková’s golden horn positively glowed over the top. Jan Hudeček’s galumphing basson played the Forester with great character in Janáček’s suite from The Cunning Little Vixen, while Oto Reiprich’s twittering flute brought the mischievous fox cubs to life. Coming together, with Jan Souček’s oboe and an extra clarinet from Jan Brabec, they sounded like a Slavonic choir in the slow movement of Janáček’s Mládi, while having terrific fun with the Scherzo’s dance rhythms.
But in the end the quintet risked becoming a mere curtain-raiser for a second half that featured some of the finest chamber music playing I've heard in years. The Pavel Haas Quartet are one of the East Neuk Festival’s most regular and welcome guests, and they gave an excoriating second half that surged with intensity from first note to last. Listening to them playing Smetana’s autobiographical String Quartet no. 1 in E minor, this felt triumphantly, defiantly like their music, music of their homeland that they're uniquely invested in, and that seeming nobody else could do so much justice to. In fact, they played it with such intensity that it felt as though it was permanently being driven to extremes, teetering on the edge of the abyss.
Šimon Truszka tore through the opening viola line as though his life depended on it, setting the tone to which all the other performers responded, nowhere more so that when cellist Peter Jarůšek played the opening solo of the third movement with the intensity of an operatic recitative. Constantly the players leaned into one another as though egging one another on. The second movement polka had a hint of danger to it, as though it was always at risk of coming apart, while the exuberance of the finale verged on hysteria, as though trying to convince itself of positivity even in the face of disaster.
That intensity made the terrible tragedy of the coda, depicting the composer's encroaching deafness, sound all the more catastrophic, deflating the music so that it looked back on itself in quiet desolation, and the quartet achieved a similar effect with Suk’s St Wenceslas meditation, moving persuasively from the muted beauty of the opening into full-throated intensity of expression as the piece develops. This tiny church in Kilrenny may be in an all but forgotten corner of Fife, but you’d have to go a long way to hear quartet playing that sounded as good as this.
