Music Reviews : Prazak Quartet Opens Coleman Season

Czechoslovakia, which must produce more quartets per capita than any nation on Earth, provided yet another highly proficient group, the Prazak Quartet, for the season opener of the Coleman Chamber Concerts at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium on Sunday afternoon.

For their local debut, the Prazaks (the name means, simply, Prague residents)--violinists Vaclav Remes and Vlastimil Holek, violist Josef Kluson, cellist Michael Kanka--presented a Czech program skillfully, if with more restraint than might be expected from ensembles of similar provenance.

A half-dozen of Dvorak’s “Cypresses,” exquisitely soothing lyric miniatures, opened the program in unhackneyed, inviting fashion.

For the less familiar of Janacek’s two quartets, the work in E minor inspired by Tolstoy’s novella “The Kreutzer Sonata,” the Prazaks added appropriate sonic weight and tension. But their interpretation contrasted sharply with the heady style to which some of their Czech predecessors have accustomed us.

If some of the Janacek theatricality was in abeyance on this occasion, the result nevertheless remained engrossing, with the bonus of a structural clarity denied to us in more heated interpretations.

In Smetana’s E-minor Quartet (“From My Life”) the Prazak again refused to be passion’s slaves, offering playing of unusual lightness, clarity and technical refinement--at the expense, however, of the gutsiness of Smetana’s stomping peasant dances.

A single encore, the Minuet from Haydn’s D-major Quartet, Opus 20, executed with stylish brilliance, served to remind us of the failure of quartets visiting this area to program Haydn, and how much the poorer we are for his absence.