Programme — String Quartet No.2 in D minor (1882-3), Allegro, Allegro moderato …

String Quartet No.2 in D minor (1882-3)

Allegro

Allegro moderato

Allegro non piu moderato, ma agitato e con fuoco

Finale: Presto - allegro

Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959)

String Quartet No.5 (1938)

Allegro non troppo

Adagio

Allegro vivo

Lento - allegro

Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904)

String Quartet in F major Op.96 “American” (1893)

Allegro ma non troppo

Lento

Molto vivace

Finale: vivace ma non troppo

Once a Czech composer always a Czech composer. It was Smetena who demonstrated that the Czech national idiom offered a musical language that could be extended into any dimension, from the merest piano polka to a three-act opera, and would last a lifetime of creativity. In fact, a polka he wrote in his mid-twenties resurfaces in the delightful second movement of his last completed score, the Second String Quartet in D minor. Written against his doctor’s orders and under great physical and mental stress, it is a work so intense in emotion and so concentrated in form that it clearly anticipates the two Janácek quartets, which would surely not have been written as they are without Smetana’s example.

Although he spent only the first half of his life in Czechoslovakia, Martinu never forgot or ceased to yearn for his roots. If there is more Bartók than Smetana in the Fifth String Quartet - the last and much the best of four written in Paris in the 1930s - it is no less personal for that. It is a turbulent work, inspired by the imminent threat of war and the (married) composer’s passion for his pupil Vitézslava Kaprálová. Anxiety pervades the first movement in a sustained fit of jagged rhythms which, however, are overlaid from time to time by achingly expressive lines of Czech melody. The slow movement is more reflective but, haunted as it is by an eerie pizzicato figure, it scarcely eases the situation. Rhythmic anxiety is resumed in the Molto vivace scherzo and continues even through the comparatively lyrical middle section. As the desolate Lento introduction to the last movement suggests and as the ensuing, unshrinking Allegro confirms, there can be no happy ending.

There has long been controversy about the melodic material of the music Dvorák wrote during the three years he spent in America in the early 1890s. Is it Czech in origin or American? Or both? The problem is particularly acute with the so-called “Amercian” Quartet in F major, which was composed on holiday in Spillville, Iowa - “a completely Czech place” according to Dvorák, “where I am very happy.” The two main themes of the first movement - the brisk statement made by the viola in the opening bars and the exquisitely nostalgic second-subject melody - are both pentatonic, which is a feature shared by many primitive musical cultures. While the expressive melody of the Lento is a sort of Czech blues, the second theme of the scherzo is unmistakably American, but only in the sense that it is based on the song of the scarlet tanager noted down on a walk in the woods by the Little Turkey river. The main theme of the closing rondo is another pentatonic tune, this one accompanied on its first appearance by an ostinato pattern dubiously identified as an Indian drum rhythm. And if the thoughtful second episode is an echo of the little organ at St Wenceslas Church in Spilville, as has been claimed, does that make it Cezch or American in inspiration?