Concert review: Škampa Quartet

The Škampa Quartet opened this Sunday morning concert with Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet. After the almost vibrato-free Adagio, the first movement was vigorous, with neat passing of semiquaver passages between the musicians and an ebb and flow of dynamic intensity. There was fine, floated dialogue between first violin and cello in the Andante cantabile, with a captivating lyrical flow interrupted only by the occasional hiatus at a cadence. The Trio of the Menuetto had punchy accents and some cheeky ponticello comments from the cello, and the finale was rhythmically neat and energetic, with delightful creamy shifts into the passages in E flat and A flat.

The Škampa followed this with Brahms’s A minor Quartet, to which it brought a smooth approach, so much so that staccato notes almost merged together in places, but it paid dividends in the silky, sinuous thirds of the first movement’s second theme. The players built steadily to a degree of heated intensity in the development, and produced a muscular finish. Within the gentle, beguiling Andante moderato there were emotional complexities, broken by the dramatic dotted-rhythm outbursts. The central Allegro vivace of the third movement had an almost Mendelssohnian lightness amid the prevailing delicacy of the Quasi menuetto, and the quartet launched into the finale with gleeful energy.