Quartet Nr. 2 op. 7 From the Monkey Mountains

Pavel Haas was one of Leoš Janácek’s most gifted students. His String Quartet No. 2 “From the Monkey Mountains” is considered to be one of the first high points of his oeuvre.

In this work, Haas combined elements of Janácek’s compositional technique with jazz, particularly in the fourth movement’s instrumentation for string quartet and percussion ad libitum. This version was premiered in Brno in 1926; later, the work was revised for string quartet only. For this edition Ondrej Pivoda has reconstructed the original version, bringing to light passages that were never published until now.

This is the first critical edition of the work. It is based on all relevant sources, taking sketches of the final version of the score and contemporary performance material into account. It includes an extensive Foreword (Cz/Eng/Ger) as well as a Critical Commentary (Eng).