On Wednesday 18^th July the festival continued with a chamber concert at the Masquerade Hall. The Škampa Quartet, one of the most sought-after Czech chamber orchestras both in the Czech Republic and abroad, performed a highly classicist program with great success. The audience heard quartets by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang A. Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. The first violinist of the Škampa Quartet, Helena Jiříkovská, expressed her impressions right after the concert, “A fantastic audience, a great hall with beautiful acoustics, which carried the sound of our quartet beautifully.” About the selected program she said the following, “All the three works which we played are closely connected in terms of time. They were written within a period of about fifteen years. The most serious of them is probably Mozart’s quartet, which is called ‘Dissonance’. In it Mozart used very unusual sequences for the time, which then appear in Romanticism. Haydn’s quartet is on the contrary playful, already its subtitle ‘Nightingale’ suggests a lot. An interesting thing is that Mozart wrote his quartet before his predecessor Haydn and dedicated it to Haydn. And Beethoven’s quartet is his relatively early opus, op. 59.”

The ovations of the audience brought the musicians back to the stage, where the musicians added a part of the final movement of Beethoven’s Quartet No. 3 Rasumovsky. The quartet did not perform at the festival for the first time. And what is the relationship of its players to Český Krumlov? “Every time we receive an invitation to the festival from Český Krumlov, we are very happy to come. Last time we played here three years ago. It is a joy for us. We loved playing here. The response of the audience was perfect. We had a feeling that we were able to communicate with the audience superbly,” were Helena Jiříkovská’s words of praise.