MENDELSSOHN GROUP PLAYS SCHOENBERG

To play the five string quartets by Arnold Schoenberg on successive evenings is a task of major magnitude.

On Tuesday, in the Schoenberg Institute at USC, the Mendelssohn String Quartet--Laurie Smukler, Nicholas Mann, violins; Ira Weller, viola, and Marcy Rosen, cello--played Quartets Nos. 4 and 1. The following night they were scheduled for the early Quartet in D of 1897 and the Quartets Nos. 3 and 2.

The Mendelssohn was wise on Tuesday to open with the last Quartet, for it comprises a kind of summing up of Schoenberg’s theories of composition and is the definitive illustration of his use of the 12-tone row as an adjunct of expression rather than as a mere technical crutch.

The complications are formidable and the logic is sensed rather than heard in detail, but the total effect is one of prodigious inventiveness and a sort of intense expressivity that grips the attention without being specific in direction.

The final Quartet is the ultimate solution of a problem. The Quartet No. 1 is more like stating the theorem and exploring its possibilities. It is one of the longest quartets ever written, though Elliott Carter may have exceeded the time limits.

The piece is a kind of grab bag of musical ideas, ranging from Viennese lilt to Tristanesque sensuousness, to impressionistic elusiveness, to Wagnerian grandeur. Labels are useless and misleading; the work lives its own life.

Both Quartets were magnificently played by the Mendelssohn. These musicians evidently think as clearly as they play; sharper definition would hardly be possible. They manage subtleties of the most extreme delicacy and they can produce floods of orchestral sonority. Their concentration is total and their endurance astonishing. They do not pretend to be Schoenberg specialists, but what other group can make Schoenberg so palatable?