San Francisco Classical Voice

The ensemble may have made its reputation in the Czech music that comprised two-thirds of the program, but opening as they did with Prokofiev's Second Quartet was a terrific stroke; I've seldom heard music and musicians come together better. The Prokofiev is a product of the composer's forced evacuation to well behind the Eastern Front during the nastier stretches of World War II; with nothing much to do but compose (and — with the best of cheering-up-the-side intentions — indulge his love of strong, straightforward tunes), he turned out a piece whose gaiety might possibly have seemed just a tiny bit forced at the time, but which sounds now like good, clean, decidedly muscular fun.

With the Skampa the accent was on the fun, with musculature as means. (There were places where Prokofiev's was certainly not the only tongue up a cheek; a certain viola-cello eruption comes to mind.) There were places of grave refinement too, like the opening of the central slow movement: non-vibrato, solemn, perfectly balanced and tuned. But if the performance left any one impression, it was of exuberant physicality. (Translation: My, what a lot of consecutive down bows!)

With the other pieces the Skampa were on home turf, as it were, and paradoxically less accommodating to Western expectations. Janácek's First Quartet got a performance that didn't linger in any of the ordinary places, and was unusually violent in the places that invite violence. It was, in other words, brief, direct, and intense. If first violinist Pavel Fischer had co-led the Prokofiev with Poláck, here it was the inner strings who were the mainsprings: violist Radim Sedmidubsky and, especially, second violinist Jana Lukásová, who played Janácek's insane second-violin parts like a woman possessed.

And in the Smetana First Quartet, it was naturally Sedmidubsky who came to the fore — practically literally, training the viola on the audience almost as though it were a weapon. The Skampas have evidently taken to heart Martin Luther's advice to "Sin boldly!," at least when it comes to breaking slurs; changing bow at the change of note in the viola solo is one thing (especially if it's done as deftly as he did it), but dividing sixteen notes under a slur into four groups of four would be almost unforgiveable were it not McKenna Theatre. Still, the Skampas didn't rely on raw power (though they had plenty), or on variety of color (they used little); it was all about rhythm, and rubato. I daresay they stepped over a line or two I wouldn't have, but it was magnificent impudence. And in something like the trio of the second-movement Polka it was more than that; it was genius. That's a movement with violins above doing swells a la accordion, and viola and cello below keeping up the polka meter. But here the swells were (at first) disappointingly small and the rhythm (at first) disconcertingly wayward, until you got it into your head that the rhythmic vagaries were the whole point, and the violins the deliberately-insignificant accompaniment. For me the whole piece was turned inside out.

Their encore was, predictably, unpredictably brilliant: they came onstage playing as they walked (Poláck with the rest, until he reached a place where he could stick his endpin into stage) a medley of traditional tunes, but one that obviously had a master arranger's hand behind it — the first was slowish and ingeniously scored so as to suggest some sort of squeezebox where there wasn't one, and the others were good ol' stompin' fiddle licks. Literally: Fischer was both-feet-off-the-stage by the end. So was half the audience.