For Czech-based Bennewitz Quartet violinist Štěpán Ježek, it's personal
The musician compares the string quartet to black-and-white photography
The Bennewitz Quartet. Photo by Pavel Ovsík
Friends of Chamber Music presents the Bennewitz Quartet on March 1 at 7:30 pm at the Vancouver Playhouse.
ON THE LINE from his home in Prague, violinist Štěpán Ježek points out the similarities between the string quartet and early photography, exciting for the very reasons it is limited.
“There’s this duality in the sense that it can be the most intimate thing, and it can be a really rich and great and gorgeous kind of music at the same time,” says Ježek, second violinist of the Czech Republic’s Bennewitz Quartet. “There is huge variety. On the other hand there are certain disadvantages to the string quartet that every composer recognizes, and the one that makes it so difficult to write a string quartet is the fact that you simply just have one colour: four string instruments that pretty much sound alike, or at least more alike than violin and piano or strings and brass, so you are restricted, and one can easily compare that to black-and-white photography.
“It poses its own challenges in photography, but what matters very much is the structure and the composition,” he says. “Not having colour, you can’t hide behind that, and you have to have the picture speaking out. With a string quartet, you can’t hide behind melody, once in strings, the second time in brass. Because it’s so well-composed, it speaks well to the audience even though you have pretty much just one colour to use.”
The Bennewitz Quartet will bring its sonic depth to the West Coast when it performs in a concert presented by Friends of Chamber Music.
Winner of Classic Prague Award 2019 for the best chamber music performance of the year in addition to numerous prestigious international awards, including the Osaka International Chamber Music Competition & Festa, the quartet also includes first violinist Jakub Fišer, Jiří Pinkas on viola, and Štěpán Doležal on violoncello. Active on the Czech domestic music scene with collaborations with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, the ensemble performs at major venues worldwide, such as Wigmore Hall London, Konzerthaus Berlin, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées Paris, The Frick Collection New York, and Seoul Art Center, to name a few, and is regularly invited to events like the Salzburger Festspiele, Luzerne Festival, Rheingau Musik Festival, Kammermusikfest Lockenhaus, and the Prague Spring.
Getting to this level, Ježek admits, is not an easy journey. “It comes with a price,” he says. “For most of us, playing the instrument is at some point a very painful experience because you have to start early. Unless you’re really a very special kid, it takes some violence to keep you at it, you know? Some musicians are just absolutely exceptionally gifted; in these cases they are self-propelled. At the same time, somebody like [Russian-born Israeli master violinist] Maxim Vengerov–he’s a demi-god. He said himself when he was 10 and he was forced to practice every day for many, many, many hours, one evening it was minus 14 and he came out and he threw himself down in the snow and wished he would freeze. And he was obviously gifted enough.
“Later, one can easily be thankful that you were given the possibility, and that your parents were patient enough and teachers were patient enough and you’re more capable,” he says. “I guess it’s part of art—one has this struggle….I believe we all feel that we would like to do better and there are obstacles we fight with and try to overcome. Sometimes there is a lot of pain and sometimes a lot of tears. It took a long time before we got comfortable enough in order to ease off and start believing that actually what we do is in some way basically good, and then you want to build on that. If you experience that long enough, you slowly start believing it, and it makes things a little easier because the fear that things will not be okay actually blocks you from expressing yourself. You have to believe in what you’re saying to convince anybody else. Not that we know this from politicians, but in music it’s tricky: you really have to be convinced about what you do in order to convince others. So it comes with a price.”
The members of the Bennewitz Quartet are known for their inspiring if challenging choices of concert repertoire, and their performance here is no exception.
The program for the quartet’s return engagement in Vancouver features Mozart’s String Quartet No. 4, K157; Leoš Janáček’s String Quartet No. 2 “Intimate Letters”; and Antonin Dvorak’s Quartet No. 13 in G Major Opus 106.
Part of the so-called Milanese quartets, Mozart’s String Quartet No. 4 was written when he was about 16 on one of his first trips to Italy with his father. He was already composing operas by that point, and this particular piece, Ježek says, was written while the prodigy and his dad were waiting to meet with someone, according to a letter the elder Mozart wrote to his family. “They were waiting for somebody to receive them; in the meantime his son is composing some quartet to kill the time,” Ježek says, adding with a laugh: “He’s bored so he composes some quartet. How do you translate this to today? A 16-year-old boy composing—it’s so laughable if you compare it to today. Lucky he didn’t have a cellphone or we would have no quartets.”
Ježek describes the piece as wonderful, fresh, and brisk with a serious and sorrowful middle section which was the norm in a three-part cycle at the time, written in the fashion that appealed to Italian audiences.
Janáček’s String Quartet No. 2 “Intimate Letters” was written for the artist’s muse, a woman he couldn’t have, late in his life. “The music doesn’t sound of a composer in the last years of his life or his late period; it has a lot of passion and a lot of struggle at some places,” Ježek says. “Janáček was a very direct person; even his intimacy can be very direct; it kind of gets in your face in a way. That was his specialty, to get in people’s faces. Generally he was very much neglected and he still is in a way, because his music is so direct and unconventional.”
The Bennewitz Quartet. Photo by Kamil Ghais
Dvorak’s Quartet #13 in G Major Opus 106 is, along with Opus 105, one of the last pieces the legendary artist wrote. Ježek recounts an anecdote about the composer listening to a rehearsal, alone in the theatre. He got up and left while the musicians were playing. Worried that something had gone terribly wrong, they went to look for him and found him in what is today the Dvořák Hall with views of the Prague Castle. “They approached him and said ‘Maestro, is everything okay?’ He said, ‘Everything is alright. I have just realized listening to you that I will probably never write anything so beautiful anymore.’ Which is kind of interesting: he was aware of the beauty he can create but he was also aware of the limits,” Ježek says. “‘That’s it, this is what I can do and I can’t do better than this. I don’t have the power and I don’t have the time.’ Then he didn’t compose any more chamber music. It’s a marvellous statement, humble and proud at the same time.
“You can see that he was a full mature composer, he is just so full of invention and ideas, and the danger of this music is it can be a little [exhausting],” Ježek adds. “It gives you so much and the first movement finishes you, and you think oh my god, what’s now coming? It’s a huge piece.”
Amid all the glorious challenges of his work, what keeps Ježek going? He recently did a survey in Prague about string quartets, which are a strong tradition in the Czech Republic, asking experienced musicians who have played together for decades about what they did to keep their ensembles running for so long.
“One of the things that was very clear for all of them was that it was absolutely a personal matter. It was something they absolutely loved,” Ježek says. “This was at the core of every ensemble. It was personal for them, much more than just work. It was something they did because they loved it.
“I think I know why: playing in a string quartet is very intense in terms of you are forced, whether you like it or not, to be very close to the other three,” he says. “There’s the question of how friendly the relationship is and how professional it is and so much in between. It’s so complex, so unless you simply love it and you love the music and you like playing together, sooner or later, after a year or two, it just gets back to you and tears you apart. There has to be something beyond all this, in order to get you propelled and give you the energy to overcome all the difficulties. It’s personal.”
For more information, see Friends of Chamber Music.
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