Stage and Music : Prague-Based Prazak Quartet Excels at Doheny

The Prazak Quartet, with nationalistic program in tow, made its return to Los Angeles Friday night in a Chamber Music in Historic Sites concert at the Doheny Mansion.

The 20-year-old Prague-based string quartet revealed a consistently robust approach to the music at hand but by no means a thoughtless one. Indeed, its performances were marked by carefully timed moments of full-bore feeling and gutsiness within nicely gauged long-range frameworks.

This proved especially welcome in the group’s account of Mozart’s “Dissonant” Quartet, K. 465, in which a sense of the dramatic opportunities of classical forms, rather than their emotional strictures, prevailed.

Anything but polite, the Prazak’s reading was boosted by huge dynamic contrasts--at least they seemed so in the intimate Doheny setting--popping accents and a wide, passionate vibrato that could occasionally seem over-the-top. The tight rhythmic focus kept the performance from all-out Romanticization.

The novelty on the program, Josef Suk’s “Meditation on an Old Bohemian Chorale,” proved short but moving, an eight-minute sweep of pensive, melancholy and finally rapturous music, beautifully scored and purposefully played.

The Prazak ensemble--violinists Vaclav Remes and Vlastimil Holek, violist Josef Kluson and cellist Michal Kanka--brought an almost deliberate manner to Smetana’s E-minor Quartet (“From My Life”), a spacious, expressively detailed, flexible and never precipitous reading. Others have found more drive in this music but few more poignancy. And the ensemble work, especially in the giddy flux of tempos in the second movement, sparkled without being finicky.

The Prazak appears in Music Guild concerts Tuesday and Wednesday, at Pierce College and the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre, respectively.