Skampa Quartet Offers Intense, Passionate Los Angeles Debut

Intensity and vigor are the hallmarks of the Skampa Quartet, the ensemble in residence at Wigmore Hall in London, this month making its West Coast debuts in Vancouver and Los Angeles. Friday night, under the close acoustical scrutiny of the Pompeian Room at the Doheny Mansion, the string players from Prague lived up to their advance publicity.

Violinists Pavel Fischer and Jana Lukasova, violist Radim Sedmidubsky and cellist Jonas Krejci are a young ensemble, just 8 years old as a quartet, who play with a laudable combination of passion and finesse.

Their program of Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, Beethoven’s Second “Rasumovsky” Quartet and Janacek’s Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters,” displayed musical probity and technical achievement clearly, for a rapt audience on the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series sponsored by the Da Camera Society of Mt. St. Mary’s College.

The Czech musicians perform as a unit, one which thinks together, yet the individual players retain their personalities. While exposing the emotional storms in the Janacek quartet, all four still kept tight rein on the limits of expressivity; the listener received the messages, but without overstatement.

The same astuteness, without any distancing of performers from content, characterized the group’s deep consideration of the E-minor Beethoven work, which some quartets treat with a diffidence that masks its open nature. And the opening Mozart pieces, instead of becoming a tepid warmer-upper, as can happen, foreshadowed the heated but controlled musicality that marked the rest of the evening.