Skampa Quartet Shows Skill, but Energy Flags

Young, accomplished and thorough, the Skampa Quartet from Prague returned Sunday afternoon, closing the 1999-2000 season of Coleman Concerts in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech. Although the four players seemed to be operating at a lower level of energy than at their local debut in 1997, theirs was an admirable performance.

The centerpiece of the occasion was “Terezin Ghetto Requiem” by Sylvie Bodorova, who was identified only as having been born in 1954. It is an anguished and touching piece, less than 20 minutes in length but mournful, affecting and tightly packed with an emotional musicality.

Sung by American baritone Christophoren Nomura--who has been touring with Skampa and this piece--the work, which juxtaposes Jewish and Roman Catholic texts over a dissonant instrumental background, specializes in powerful effects.

After intermission, and again without enlisting all the vigor and intensity one remembers from its first performance here, the quartet--violinists Pavel Fischer and Jana Lukasova, violist Radim Sedmidubsky and new cellist Peter Jarusek--nevertheless met the measure of Janacek’s impassioned Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters.”

The opener was a careful, almost timid run-through of Mozart’s Quartet in A, K. 464.