New Hollywood String Quartets Bohemian Summer: More, Please

Bohuslav Martin was nine years old and living in Bohemia when the future home of Los Angeles oil baron Edward L. Doheny was completed. Bedich Smetana, considered the father of Czech nationalist music, had died 15 years earlier, and Antonn Dvok, after a productive (if unhappy) period of composing and conducting in the United States, had returned home to his beloved Prague.

On Saturday, under the Tiffany domed ceiling of Doheny Mansions' Pompeian Room, members of New Hollywood String Quartet (NHSQ) gave the third of four concerts devoted to the rich musical repertoire that defined the Czech nationalist movement. The quartet's core members, violinists Tereza Stanislav and Rafael Rishik, violist Robert Brophy and cellist Andrew Shulman, were joined by pianists Rohan De Silva and Rodolfo Leone and cellist Eric Byers.

This celebration of Bohemian Summer represents the latest in a series of chamber music festivals presented by NHSQ in collaboration with the Da Camera Society of Mount Saint Marys University, whose Chester Place campus includes Doheny Mansion.

The mini-festivals began in 2019 with Brahms Summer, which featured performances of the composer’s 25 instrumental chamber works, presented in eight consecutive concerts. In 2021, Vienna Holiday celebrated the chamber music of Franz Schubert and Mozart. 2022 was Beethoven Summer, and 2023 was dubbed Paris Summer, dedicated to the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

In a judicious choice of programming, Martin's Cello Sonata No. 1 in B flat minor, Dvok's Piano Quartet No. 2 in E flat major and Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 in E minor (From My Life) were performed in reverse historical order, like Stephen Sondheim's look back We are rolling happily.

In 1939 Martin was living in Paris, about to flee to America, a stopover before the Nazis. His music of this period is clearly influenced by the vocabulary of 1930s modernism. By 1889 Dvok was at the height of his powers, expanding Brahms's romanticism to include a bohemian accent of enthusiastic and seemingly endless inventiveness.

The journey back reached its zero point in 1876 with Smetana, who was slowly dying of syphilis, taking the form of the string quartet into a personal narrative tone poem combining emotional depth with the dreamlike, sophisticated brilliance of 19th-century bohemian elegance.

In his introductory speech, musicologist and artistic director of the Da Camera Society, Julius Carlson, emphasized the geographical position of Bohemia, which is an exception to the cultural Mecca of Vienna. He also highlighted the important role played by the adoption of Bohemian folk traditions and dances in the establishment of an independent nationalist musical movement in Vienna.

What has not been mentioned is the later influence of what had happened in Paris between the two world wars, notably the impact of Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev and the loosely affiliated composers of Les Six. De Silva and Shulman's interpretation of Martin's sonata clearly captured the momentum of the times with its percussive attacks, back-and-forth rhythms and dense clusters of sound, all overshadowed by the looming war.

Reflecting a very different historical era, the performance of Dvoks's Second Piano Quartet, featuring Leone, Rishik, Brophy and Byers, sparkled and shimmered as the work's four movements oscillated between crystalline sophistication, bubbling energy and ensemble expressions that filled the hall with their symphonic dimension.

The final performance of Smetana's quartet, performed by NHSQ, perfectly captured the composer's sense of regret mixed with snatches of lamentable memories of happier times, of loves won and lost and dances danced.

It is hard to imagine a more perfect setting for this concert than Pompeii Hall, an acoustically luminous space in the grand tradition of the Gilded Age. It is easy to forget, in the age of grand concert halls, what it is like to be able to savor every tone, every harmonic, and every gently fading diminuendo.

The Da Camera Society deserves credit for its 50 years of musical presentations. One could only wish that during the long Los Angeles summer, when the musical landscape is almost entirely consumed by concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, the Doheny Mansion could open its doors to a succession of similar intimate chamber music events.