By Lyn Bronson

Last night at All Saints Episcopal Church in Carmel we heard the Bennewitz String Quartet in a concert presented by the Mozart Society Series of the Carmel Music Society. Winner of the 2008 Borciani Quartet Competition, the four players in the Quartet, violinists Jiri Nemecek & Stepan Jezek, violist Jiri Pinkas, and cellist Stepan Dolezal, may have looked as youthful as teenagers, but the sounds that blended and soared from their instruments instantly identified them as masters of their craft.

The initial surprise of the evening was the first work on the program, Mozart’s Quartet in G Major, K. 156, a work written when he was only sixteen, but already a compelling piece that hinted of great masterpieces to follow. The charming first movement said a lot in its brief three-minute duration, and the flashes of Sturm und Drang in the development section were tantalizing in their brevity. After a lovely Adagio in a minor key, the last movement, Tempo di Menuetto, once again charmed us with its lively wit and forays into minor keys in its development section.

However, this was only an appetizer to the great masterpiece on the evening’s program, Smetana’s Quartet No. 1 in E minor, “From My Life.”  Written eight years before his death, and at a time when he was totally deaf, the composer wrote to a friend, “I wanted to depict in music the course of my life … written for four instruments which, as in a small circle of friends, talk among themselves about what has oppressed me so significantly.” When the four players lifted their bows and launched into this work, we heard a virtual symphony of extraordinary proportions reduced to the timbre of four string instruments. Furthermore, the lively acoustics of All Saints Church served to amplify the four instruments, additionally creating the illusion of a much larger ensemble.

The beginning of this quartet, with the viola’s bold melody against a drone from the other instruments, was a startling way to begin a work, and the surprises kept coming at us. In the second movement, Allegro moderato à la polka, mixed in with the identifiable polka and lingering in the background was a whiff of the Gemütlichkeit of Strauss and Lehar — at one point  I thought it was about to break into “I’ll See You At Maxine’s” from “The Merry Widow.” However, nothing so trivial happened in this movement, and the amazing vitality from the four players held us spellbound throughout.

The cello solo by Dolezal that began the third movement was gorgeous, and all that followed was deeply moving. The extremes of dynamic control exerted by the four players was amazing in the frenzied perpetual motion mood of much of the final movement, occasionally interrupted by alternating moments of unearthly serenity and anguish. The quiet conclusion of the last movement — the way the music became softer and softer, and finally evaporated mysteriously into nothing, was the ultimate dramatic conclusion. This was a great work in a great performance.

To some it may have seemed that the final work on the program, Schubert’s  great Quartet in A minor, “Rosamunde,” was a bit of an anticlimax after the amazing intensity of the Smetana. Schubert, alas, did tend to ramble and take leisurely journeys through adjacent keys and sometimes repeat the same material over and over. However, the performance by the four players was extraordinary. The familiar Schubertian elements (suggestions of the rocking accompaniment from Gretchen am Spinnrade) and the lovely Rosamunde theme (which he used to far better advantage in the Impromptu in B-flat, Op. 142, for solo piano) were charming.

The players gave us one encore, an arrangement for string quartet of one of the Bach Chorales.

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