PANOCHA QUARTET PLAYS AT MUSIC GUILD EVENT

No brashness, no stridency, no abrasiveness appear in the playing of the splendid Panocha Quartet, which returned to us, courtesy of Music Guild, Wednesday night in Wilshire Ebell Theatre.

In the place of bumptiousness, the ensemble from Czechoslovakia offers gentle (as opposed to aggressive) musicality, scrubbed-clean linearity and a non-neurotic interpretive stance toward the scores it chooses to address.

On this occasion, those scores were Haydn’s “Lark” Quartet (Opus 64, No. 5), Shostakovich’s First Quartet (1938) and Dvorak’s Quartet in E-flat, before which the group played a Waltz in A by the same composer.

Despite the handsome sounds and technical achievement displayed in these performances, the four players from Prague--violinists Jiri Panoch and Pavel Vejfart, violist Miroslav Sehnoutka and cellist Jaroslav Kulhan--failed, in virtually every movement save the Waltz, to give a complete picture of these works: their substance, content and emotional range.

Instead, they provided soft-grained lyricism, gracious ensemble, self-communion and no disagreements. Musically, all was in place: tempos, transitions, structure, a quiet sense of continuity. But, without the elements of conflict and progression in the mix, all these virtues seemed empty, and added up to little.