This is a concise, witty—even funny—string quartet written by the leading Czech composer after Leos Janácek (1854 - 1928). Bohuslav Martinu (1890 - 1956) showed here that he had entirely absorbed the spirit of musical Paris in the 1920s, a fabled time and place of artistic experimentation and movements, nose thumbing at the cultural elite, and jazz.

Martinu was 33 and still in search of his own personal voice and style when he moved from staid Prague to explosive Paris in 1923. Although he made regular and sometimes prolonged trips home to visit, Martinu would never again be a resident of his native land. Later, the fate of Czechoslovakia and homesickness—once war and global politics closed his homeland to him—would be a major element of his music.

But now Martinu was a lively Parisian, a Bohemian in the cultural sense of the word as well as literally in his ethnic origin. He was a rising star among the many expatriate composers of many countries who flocked to the City of Light, and one of the most individual. This quartet was obviously composed to cater to the avant-garde crowd. Its very skillful part-writing gives each of the four instruments a separate identity. This makes this three-movement, 12-minute miniature quartet unusually rewarding in return for close listening.

The independence of these lines often takes them into major dissonant clashes with each other. In the outer movements this leads to humor, but there is a tragic element in the slow middle movement.

Martinu had made his initial reputation in Paris in chamber music and music for smaller ensembles, but in the last two or three years of the decade orchestral music took greater prominence. His last string quartet had been written in 1925. Martinu returned to the string quartet, one of his favorite genres, with a new ingredient: jazz.

The first movement, Allegro, starts with a slinky rhythm played on plucked cello and viola col legno—that is, with the strings being tapped by the back of the bow. To this unusual percussive effect, the solo violin plays a vampish figuration in a low registers. This figure will be played on all the instruments at some point, often varied, while other strings play fast runs that often break into a jazz rhythm. The violin seems to lift the whole texture into higher registers and the music takes on a more driving character as the jazz beats become more prominent. The tempo relaxes so the music can die out when it reaches a final pizzicato chord.

The jazz elements in the first movement predispose the listener to interpret the ambiguous modality of the middle movement, Andante, as a kind of blues effect. Disturbed chords and low trills add a dark emotional note to the movement, which rises to a crying central section and ends in a mood of resigned anguish, except for an unexpectedly calming final chord.

All four strings scurry about in a slightly macabre concluding Vivo.

© All Music Guide