The Sukovo Quartet

Suk's Quartet
Daniel Matejča, Natálie Toperczerová / violin
Bohumil Bondarenko / viola
Jakub William Gráf / cello

Program:
Bedrich Smetana
Dalibor, mixture for string quartet (arr. Josef Žemla)
String Quartet No. 2 in D minor
Josef Suk
String Quartet No. 1 Op. 11

One of the great celebrants of the Year of Czech Music 2024 is the composer and violinist Josef Suk, who would have celebrated his 150th birthday this year. Only recently has Suk's symphonic work begun to receive the attention it undoubtedly deserves. His monumental symphonic compositions find their way into the repertoire of major world orchestras and top conductors, and increasingly establish their author as a completely unique voice in European music of the late 19th and first third of the 20th century. Suk's chamber work, on the other hand, was performed with greater regularity, however, primarily in the composer's homeland. One of the two central compositions of this concert is Suk's Quartet No. 1 in B flat major, op. 11 (1896), an extensive work of the composer's youth (he was only 22 years old) definitively confirming Suk's reputation as the most outstanding talent in the composition class of Antonín Dvořák, with whom he studied in 1891-2. The second central composition of the evening is Smetana's String Quartet No. 2 in D minor, unjustifiably standing somewhat in the shadow of its more famous predecessor. The fact that it doesn't have as attractive a title as No. 1 From My Life perhaps somewhat masks that it is a work that is just as autobiographical and just as magnificent.
A small, occasional contribution to the theme of metamorphoses is a virtually unknown potpourri from Smetana's opera Dalibor, arranged by Josef Žemla for string quartet. Such medleys represented the simplest and most effective form of dissemination of 19th-century operas among bourgeois society; after all, Smetana himself created one of these and assigned it to a solo piano. Today, similar undemanding arrangements seem more like evidence of one of the forms of musical life before the creation of the recording of musical productions.