ENSEMBLE CHANGES : SEQUOIANS INTRODUCE A HALF-NEW QUARTET

The old Sequoia is half dead. Long live the new Sequoia.

The reference isn’t to a tree. The reference is to an ensemble of musicians: the Sequoia String Quartet. For the past dozen years, the Sequoia has been a source of quiet pride and joy in a city that usually prizes art in big, splashy, noisy, ultraglamorous packages.

The anachronistic Sequoia always represented civility, sophistication and refinement. It was comforting.

Then came the blow. Two of the Sequoians--the first violinist, Yoko Matsuda, and the cellist, Robert Martin--decided that it was time to explore other aspirations. Half the team had to be replaced.

A prospect like that can cause chronic if not terminal panic even in the stoutest of poetic hearts. A good quartet--and the Sequoia was very good, indeed--is like a family. It thrives on intimate relationships.

The four players involved cannot just be virtuosos. They must be virtuosos who understand each other, who stimulate each other, who complement each other, who intuit each other, and who even listen to each other.

Success in chamber music often is predicated on a delicate extramusical, intrapersonal equation. The Sequoia minus Matsuda and Martin, the doomsayers had to fear, might become just another gathering of music makers.

The panic, it turns out, was blissfully premature. Once again, gloom has been miraculously averted in the city of cultural angels. If one may judge by the official debut of the half-new Sequoia at the Japan America Theatre Monday night, the right bodies have been found to fill the vacant chairs.

It is a bit early, of course, to ascertain the extent to which the changes in personnel will enforce changes in musical character and perspective. Changes, in any case, are healthy and inevitable.

Peter Marsh, the new violinist, is a musician of rare delicacy and introspection. Bringing seasoned authority to his pivotal role, he favors slender tone, rhythmic precision and a minute scale of dynamic subtleties.

Marius May, the new cellist, plays with carefully muted energy, abiding clarity and poised, mellow tone.

Miwako Watanabe and James Dunham, the survivors of the previous regime, tend to paint with somewhat broader strokes. The sound of her violin remains a bit richer than the new norm, and the outpourings of his viola seem a bit darker.

Occasionally, the fusion of old and new guards threatens a discrepancy in phrase or intensity. For the most part, however, one can savor a mutually enhancing juxtaposition of the thick and the thin, not to mention a flexible, generous give and take of expressive impulses.

In Beethoven’s F-major Quartet, Opus 18, No. 1, the Sequoians stressed the bold complexities that point to gnarled romanticism rather than the formal innocence that harks back to classicism. The interpretation is, of course, eminently defensible, and the performers conveyed its dramatic point with elegant restraint.

In the quirky, episodic, ultimately poignant rhetoric of the Shostakovich Quartet No. 8--a miracle created in three days of 1960--the Sequoians capitalized on nervous vitality, telling splashes of color and cumulative tension.

In the obvious piece de resistance , Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” they attended to the profound sentiment, the arching lyricism and the feverish bravura with masterful, heroic calm.

It was an auspicious second beginning.