Quartet In B Flat K458 (Hunt) - Mozart
Quartet No 1 (Kreutzer Sonata) - Janβcek
Quartet In G Minor - Debussy
The Gate Theatre is not often used for purely musical events, and Sunday's appearance by the Skampa Quartet, presented in association with Limerick Music Association, is only the second occasion in recent years that a chamber-music concert has taken place there.
As you would expect, the acoustic is very much on the dry side for music, but there was a greater sense of musical presence on Sunday than there was, say, for the Ardittis at Project two weeks earlier.
Whether or not it was a matter of the difficult acoustics, the concert didn't get off to a good start.
The leader, Pavel Fischer, came seriously unstuck more than once in Mozart's Hunt Quartet, and the players' style, rather too heavily accented for Mozart, yielded to the music's needs only in the poignant calm of the adagio.
The Skampa's Debussy was robust and clear in its demarcations of foreground and background. It's the sort of approach adopted by many quartets, but it relegates too much of Debussy's writing to secondary roles.
The music's individuality becomes apparent only when more of the notes are made to count. That sense, missing in the Debussy, of every minute gesture contributing to the whole was the most striking feature of the Skampa's handling of the remarkably expressive ferment of Janβcek's First String Quartet.
Every last rasp and stab of intensity, rush of adrenaline and sustained tremolo made its mark in the Skampa's performance of this work, which was inspired by the heroine of Tolstoy's story The Kreutzer Sonata, a woman trapped by marriage and, in Janβcek's words, "tortured, stricken, worried to death".
