The chamber music Schubert composed in the last four years of his life collectively represents one of the great creative achievements of Western culture. Academic criticism and analysis are currently teeming around this repertoire, with a number of recent and forthcoming books and articles engaging what we are increasingly pleased to call ‘late Schubert’. It seems as though we have woken up to the sense that there is more to Schubert’s instrumental music than ‘heavenly length’, and that the compositions of 1824–28 (the years encompassing ‘Schubert’s Beethoven Project’, in John Gingerich’s influential formulation) hold much for the twenty-first-century mind to contemplate. When we listen to Schubert these days we are more likely to listen for deep traces of the human condition – yearning memory, psychological exile, existential angst – rather than buoyant lyricism or Viennese Gemütlichkeit.

The Pavel Haas Quartet, named in honour of the Czech composer who composed music while interred at Theresienstadt and who was later murdered at Auschwitz, seems founded on the idea of a courageous high-stakes engagement with music. Thus they are well placed to introduce listeners to a newer, darker Schubert. Their ambitious recording of Schubert has already been celebrated with a brace of enthusiastic reviews as well as the 2014 Gramophone Award for Chamber Music.

Few pieces project dark intensity as immediately as Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor, D. 810, known as the ‘Death and the Maiden’ Quartet. It opens with a defiant speech act, two terse phrases usually performed with implacable ferocity, as though by the jaws of death. The Haas players do not bite the endings off, as so many other quartets do, but rather make of this opening something perhaps even more sinister. By deploying a more deliberate tempo and emphasizing the insistent D’s of the outer voices, they create a less impassioned, but more consequential sound. The hollowness of the opening is emphasized: amid the roar of three octaves of D, Schubert establishes D minor with two swift stepwise utterances that complete a bleakly linear cadential progression (i to iv, then V to i).

Schubert creates immediate contrast by quietly repeating the charged triplet figure of the opening three times, leading to a poignant subdominant harmony and a calmer triplet rhythm, now slowed to three quarter notes. This respite allows the theme proper to emerge with striking effect, bringing that breakneck opening rhythm into an operational thematic trajectory, with triplets now accompanying every other beat. Yet here too the Haas quartet plays with subtle deliberation, leaving room for the dramatic intensification of the theme’s later returns.

I linger on this opening, as I believe it reveals several things that are special in the Haas Quartet’s performance of Schubert. For one, they respond emphatically to the increase in accompanimental animation in Schubert’s later instrumental pieces – we are made to hear all those anxious repeated notes, to accept their presence as something like an existential condition of the music. And they let Schubert’s contrasts profile the drama locally, but they never lose the long view in favour of such local effects. By the time we reach the coda, with its heavy chords that settle into place like sacks of despair, we realize that we have been devastated not with sudden fits of ferocity but with a steady pressure that approaches both panic and despondency but never flares out in either state.

If triplets dominate the rhythmic landscape of the first movement, the Andante con moto doubles down on rhythmic saturation by running a set of variations on a theme that is permeated with dactyls (long-short-short), leavened by a few spondees (long-long). The theme is from Schubert’s famous song ‘Death and the Maiden’, in which Death attempts to convince a terrified maiden that he is a gentle friend rather than a punitive maniac. By raising the level of anxious animation variation by variation, Schubert transforms the song’s already fraught but straightforward scenario into a staggering emotional journey. The Haas Quartet takes this movement at a somewhat quicker tempo than is often the case, another subtle strategy that begins to pay off in the churning third variation, with its dactyls condensed to every beat. After the major-mode fourth variation, the ominously quiet final variation drops back into minor and builds to a climactic textural explosion in which each voice breaks out with its own rhythm. This is the moment when all the taut toe-to-toe with Death finally erupts into the full realization of mortality. But instead of the chaotic sound of utter panic, Schubert creates what has always struck me as the sound of the human spirit bearing up under our mortal burden, as if to affirm that our greatest resources suddenly become available at those moments when we need them most, when we are utterly on our own. This is nothing less than the very core of existential awareness, and the Haas Quartet matches these stakes as well as anyone.

In Schubert’s saltarello-style finale, the Haas players are again more deliberate in tempo than most, which allows them to be more varied in the colour of attacks among the different instruments. Thus the result is not simply a ‘short ride in a fast machine’, but again creates a compelling dramatic trajectory. Toward the end, we begin to hear hints of Czech accents in their performance, and in the galloping Prestissimo at the very end we learn what Schubert can do when all the nervous agitation is funnelled into pure speed.

After such a stirring performance of D. 810, one expects much from their reading of the String Quintet, D. 956, Schubert’s last and most acclaimed chamber work. The Haas Quartet, now joined by acclaimed cellist Danjulo Ishizaka, again delivers, and for many of the same reasons. Their performance is characterized by rhythmic deliberation throughout and superb control of tempo, which is subtly tightened and loosened as needed. In the opening movement, for example, the tempo is tightened in the animated restatement of the first theme, and loosened at the expressive hinges of the famous cello duet. Other memorable highlights of the first movement include the dramatically sculpted retransition passage before the recapitulated opening theme, and the volcanic coda, in which the unison cellists seem to burn a passage downward to the movement’s climactic arrival on the final big dominant harmony.

The opening page of the E-major Adagio presents a rare tableau: within a capacious $$\raster="rg1"$$ meter, three inner voices sustain an impossibly slow melody, while the first violin and second cello seem to act as time keepers, the cello emphasizing beats one and three with pizzicato attacks and the violin deploying dotted rhythms and a mostly static pitch (B) to emphasize beats two and four. But the Pavel Haas group brings something new and remarkable to this already extraordinary texture. First violinist Veronika Jarůšková plays her part rather more expressively than usual, giving those dotted rhythms a rare vulnerability, which along with the limited pitch range makes for a complex emotional effect. This lets us reimagine Schubert’s opening tableau as something like a setting for the first violin, whose incipient expressivity rises to anguished song in the movement’s agitated F-minor middle section. The Haas players make Schubert’s astonishing transition back to the opening tableau even more so, with shockingly ample silences that come on like a crisis of faith, followed by the balm of simple cadential harmonies, sustained in this performance to such a degree as to offer blessed reassurance. And when the E-major music begins again, the first violin and second cello now find a vastly different way to interact, no longer corporeally wedded to the beat as timekeepers but floating like disembodied ghosts, conversing in a new language somehow both intimate and otherworldly. The reverberant presence of the Haas recording creates a perfect medium for this visitation.

As if to break the spell of the Adagio, Schubert opens his Scherzo with a crash of tonic and dominant harmonies, a sonic explosion that impels the Haas players to keep tempo and energy blazing like a house on fire. This conflagration of sound frames what has to be the most plangent trio section in the entire literature. Slowing the tempo from presto to andante sostenuto, the viola and second cello together sing a lamenting line that steps progressively downward into the depths of C major’s flat-side, reaching bottom amid solemn plagal harmonies in D-flat major. The alternation of these sombre cadences with the keening melodic line above seems to speak of some ancient sadness. The return from this underworld back to the daylight revelry of the Scherzo is streamlined somewhat in the Haas Quartet’s version by a fascinating cut in the repeat of the Trio’s B section. Instead of repeating the entire B section, they splice the twelfth bar of the repeated B section directly to the transitional bars that lead back to the Scherzo. Thus they omit the repetition of a beautiful ‘arrival six four’ in D flat, a magical move reminiscent of the very end of the Adagio movement, where the sudden apparition of F minor relaxes back to E major via the same voice leading. But they compensate for that loss by stitching together a threefold descending sequence that seems to sink through layers of mystery back to the dominant of the C-major Scherzo.

For the Hungarian-style dance that is Schubert’s finale, the Haas Quartet keeps the allegretto tempo moving a bit more rapidly than in many other recordings but plays with enough restraint to make possible an amazing increase of intensity during the last minute of the piece. After crossing over into Schubert’s più allegro (the final return of the opening rondo theme), the Haas players allow their tempo to accelerate slightly with each tonal rise, even before the much more overt burst of speed at Schubert’s final tempo change, marked più presto. I doubt if you’ll encounter a more exhilarating version of this ending, but even here the Haas players never spill over into reckless abandon, delivering instead the thrill of high-voltage precision.

Throughout their bracing renditions of the works on this recording, the Pavel Haas Quartet combines never flagging energy with attention to detail, making sure we stay aware of every nuance of Schubert’s textures, every anxious twitch. This kind of control extends to their subtle regulation of tempo, which they often moderate so as to leave room for expressive intensification. Their capacity for raising the stakes makes vivid the desperate intensity of an existential Schubert, no longer the Biedermeier songbird but now a truly modern spirit, weighed down with – yet also somehow buoyed by – an unflinching willingness to address the full range of the human predicament.