Skampa Quartet - Reviews

Tensions, Passions

“Czech Night” at the Nabering Concerts at Freiburg Music Academy

The drama is announced immediately in the opening bars. A yearning ascending phrase in the muted upper strings, an energetic interjection from the cello – Janacek’s first String Quartet comes straight to the point. It tells of tensions and passions, of manias and depression. Tolstoy’s novella of jealousy The Kreutzer Sonata was the inspiration for the Czech composer’s Quartet written in 1923. In the superb interpretation of the Škampa Quartet from Prague the drama comes vividly to life.

The abruptly cut off suggestions of folk music in the second movement, the ghostly tremolos played on the bridge by the second violin (Daniela Součková) and the viola (RadimSedmidubský) but also in the frenzied repetitions of the quartet’s opening motif in the finale with the violinist Helena Jiříkovská and the cellist LukášPolák equally strong and then the final notes in the instruments’ upper registers which the four remarkable musicians play with instinctively certain intonation - the story is powerfully told, with changes of mood and colour, with manias and cataclysms. The splendid Kreutzer Sonata quartet brought to an end the Czech Evening in the Nabering concert series which was greeted with great enthusiasm by the audience at the Freiburg Academy of Music

Georg Rudiger, Badische Zeitung, 16. September 2011