Signum Quartet: the earth trembled

The Strad Issue: November 2026

Description: Janáček set in a new context proves thrilling

Musicians: Signum Quartet

Works: Janáček: String Quartets: no.1 ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, no.2 ‘Intimate Letters’. Kaprálová: String Quartet op.8. Tolstoy: Waltz; fragments from Album for Kamila Stӧsslová (arr. Xandi van Dijk) and Moravian Folk Poetry

Catalogue number: PENTATONE PTC5187527

Discovering indigenous folk music enabled Janáček to forge his highly individual revolutionary style, by turns intimately feathery or furiously charged. You’re never meant to be comfortable, but hurl headlong into the torrid tale of lust, betrayal and murder that colours Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata. As the train hurtles along, we do too, and this performance captures that immediacy and Janáček’s fluid invention. Similarly, the Signum Quartet is superbly vivid in the charged trills that open his ‘Intimate Letters’, the players’ understanding of the work’s extreme fluctuations of emotions allied to a narrative drive making for a compelling listen.

The function of the very short extracts from the Album for Kamila Stösslová and Moravian Folk Poetry is to trace the ideas that infused Janáček’s major works, and to an extent this is effective, though some are so brief they’re easily missed.

A benefit of this enterprising recording project is to contextualise Janáček’s work against those of younger composers, in this case the early String Quartet by the tragically short-lived Vítězslava Kaprálová. Although dating from later than Janáček’s towering works, she has absorbed a similar fluidity, with whispers of folk music-like invention as well as projecting a similar emotional intensity, although cast on more stable harmonic ground.

JOANNE TALBOT