Stamic Quartet: Novák

The Strad Issue: August 2025

Description: A fine quartet signs off with music by a notable Dvořák pupil

Musicians: Stamic Quartet

Works: Novák: String Quartets nos.1–3

Catalogue number: SUPRAPHON SU4367-2

The publicity announces that this, first-ever set of the quartets by Vítězslav Novák ‘definitively completes’ the catalogue of recordings made by the Stamic Quartet, now 40 years old. That’s a shame if so, but the group is going out on a high. Among the most individually minded of Dvořák’s students, Novák was already pulling away from his teacher when infusing the sturdy Bohemian humour of his First Quartet (1899) with a fin-de-siècle anxiety.

The intricate fusion of dance suite, sonata form and rondo that closes the First then raises the curtain on the more radical form and harmony of the Second Quartet (1905). If you know some of Novák’s Straussian tone-poems from the time, such as In the Tatra Mountains, you’re in for an early-Bartókian surprise. A slow fugue gravely unfolds and explores a tonally irresolute subject, not so much wandering off course as seeking light in the darkness. Here the Stamic’s cultivated blend and old-school vibrato, inimitably Czech in its approach, taps into Novák’s pervasive strain of melancholy. A 16-minute Fantasia serves as companion and completion to the fugue without tying up its open ends in a neat bow.

Novák only returned to quartet writing 33 years later, by which time the world had changed, and so had he. Another expansive two-movement form now integrates his earlier chromaticism in a spirit of autumnal maturity – or is it weary resignation? So it seems, until the very last pages fly upwards towards the light. Either way, the Stamic gives Novák his long-belated due, in an equably balanced studio recording.

PETER QUANTRILL