Picture
Pavel Haas with his wife and daughter before the War.

track of the month: august

You're listening to the Hawthorne String Quartet performance (recorded on a Decca Entartete Musik CD) of "The Moon and I," the third movement, Largo e Misterioso, of the String Quartet No. 2, "From the Monkey Mountains," ​by Terezín composer

Pavel Haas

Pavel Haas, born in 1899 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was the prize pupil of Leos Janacek and is known primarily for his song cycles and string quartets. He was deported to Terezín in 1941, and he officially divorced his wife so that she and their child would not suffer a similar fate. With Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krasa, and others, Haas became a major figure in the camp's cultural life. He was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944.

Gramophone writes:
"Decca's Entartete Musik series could well be one of the most valuable and important ongoing projects that the record industry has on offer at the moment. . . . Excellent performances by the Hawthorne Quartet.

Haas's Second String Quartet "From the Monkey Mountains" Op. 7 is a delightful discovery.  . . . The slow movement (''The Moon and I'') forms a passionately lyrical song of great intensity. The final movement is full of wild abandonment and jazz influences—the booklet-notes rightly point out the presence of the rhythm of the rumba, but this is very much a Czech rumba!"
(Listen to the fourth movement here.)
More music in our Track of the Month series is here.