MUSIC; Prague spring

Czech Music Festival Leamington Spa

As the rest of the country, basking in unseasonable sunshine and record temperatures, prepared to celebrate VE Day with suitable civic pomp, Leamington Spa opted for a more detailed examination of a single strand of European culture with a short, five-day festival of Czech chamber music.

Those who know the Warwick and Leamington Festival, now fruitfully twinned with the South Bohemian Music Festival, will not be surprised that Czech beer was flowing in the Royal Pump Room alongside elaborate exhibitions of the great and the good of Bohemian and Moravian music. There was a walk around Leamington's sights of Czech interest; while, in a gripping lecture, Callum Macdonald offered a timely reminder that, as Western Europe danced in celebration 50 years ago, there was still fighting in the streets of Prague. What did seem remarkable, on this of all holidays, was that audiences were neither put off by the single-mindedness of the event nor seduced by the sunshine.

But perhaps it is not quite so surprising - the music of this "far away country" has a secure place in the hearts of the British. Indeed, with the operas of Janacek, we have seized the initiative in performance and production. If this is not quite the case in the realm of chamber music, British players do have their own accent. A weekend that offered a generous helping of Czech groups, including the Kocian Quartet, and the pianist Radoslav Kvapil, also fielded the Schubert Ensemble and the Lindsay Quartet. Both ensembles have a distinguished record in the Czech repertoire with a sure grip on the passions and complexities of the music.

The Schubert Ensemble's performance of Smetana's G minor Piano Trio on Sunday was as idiomatic and perceptive as any one is likely to hear. Smetana's Trio is the grandparent of an idiosyncratic trend in Czech chamber music which, unusually for such an abstract medium, draws in aspects of autobiography. Developing through his own string quartets, the tradition culminates in the astonishingly powerful, highly personal, quartets of Janacek. With a fine sense of dramatic timing and a refusal to inflate the sentiment, the Schubert Ensemble captured the sadness and despair of this work written to commemorate the death of a beloved daughter.

As an extra item - a "pre-encore" as Peter Cropper put it - the Lindsay Quartet gave us a rarity by Vilem Tausky. His meditation, Coventry, written a day after the wartime bombing of the city's cathedral, was rich in impressionist tints, and provided a moving upbeat to some blistering contrasts. If the Lindsay tried a little too hard to capture the mood in the slow movement of Dvorak's F minor quartet - better known in a version for violin and orchestra, entitled Romance - and in Two Waltzes Op 54, its performance of Janacek's First Quartet was a riveting experience.

The contrast here with Czech ensembles is that no attempt was made to beautify the brutality of the gestures or soften the hard edges; this was music-making that tore, almost literally, at the heart strings. The reading does not replace the classic Czech approach, but its individuality and integrity offers clear evidence that this music, once thought strange and inaccessible, is as central to our repertoire as it is to the Czechs'.

Jan Smaczny