THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW Pavel Haas Quartet
PHOTOGRAPHY: BORIS GILTBURG
As they celebrate their 20th anniversary, the Czech quartet speak to Rebecca Franks about their beginnings, welcoming new players into the group and their new Brahms recording On a Sunday morning in Prague, four musicians are crammed onto a sofa, jostling for position in front of a laptop screen. The sound isn’t working properly – there’s a lot of laughter and some accidental close-up views of the apartment floor before the glitch is fixed. And there are other distractions. First violinist Veronika Jarůšková jokes that the whole way through our interview she can hear the washing machine in the background. Meanwhile, second violinist Marek Zwiebel hopes that they won’t have to rehearse too long later, so that he can get to his son’s birthday party. This is the unfiltered version of life with the Pavel Haas Quartet, in which music, family and friendship are inseparable.
It’s 20 years since the ensemble was founded. Now one of the world’s leading string quartets, renowned for their impassioned, emotional and intelligent performances, awards and accolades have streamed in – at the BBC Music Magazine Awards alone, they have won best Newcomer (in 2007, for a recording of Janáček and Haas) and the Chamber category (in 2016, for Smetana). Jarůšková, the group’s original co-founder, still leads the quartet, but in 2016 her other co-founder, viola player Pavel Nikl, left for family reasons. Now, after a long search, viola player Luosha Fang is their newest member. And to cap things off, the Pavel Haas has a new recording out – of Brahms – on their beloved Supraphon label.
‘I can’t believe how time has flown,’ says Jarůšková. ‘Twenty years, what can I say?’ Cellist Peter Jarůšek chips in – I get used to the conversation dancing around like music with these four: ‘We didn’t plan a career. We didn’t have any strategy. We just really loved chamber music and wanted to play as well as possible, for our audience and our ears.’ Perhaps they didn’t plan such milestones as the wins at the Prague Spring Festival Competition and Premio Paolo Borciani in Italy, or the stint as BBC New Generation Artists, but their total commitment was intentional. ‘I remember that I was doing masterclasses with Pavel Nikl, and we made this kind of statement,’ says Jarůšková. ‘We made a fire in the garden, and we said, okay, let’s do this quartet properly with the two of our hearts and let’s see what happens.’
‘It was a
