MUSIC REVIEWS : ORLANDO QUARTET

An appealing match of performers and venue was provided by the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College on Friday: the Netherlands-based Orlando String Quartet amid the Tiffany glass and marble of the downtown Doheny Mansion.

This excellent ensemble has, with the recent acquisition of a new first violinist, Charles Andre Linale, added heft and rhythmic bite without altering a basic profile notable for refinement of tone, brightly lean sonority and quickish tempos.

The Orlando, which also includes second violinist Heinz Oberdorfer, violist Ferdinand Erblich and cellist Stefan Metz, rendered Bartok’s Second Quartet very much in the Hungarian style: briskly, less weightily, with greater emphasis on linear clarity and the music’s balance of poignant lyricism and ferocity than we encounter from most of the American quartets, whose preoccupation is the presumed Bartokian gloom, doom and spleen.

Mozart’s Quartet in G, K. 387, which brought the concert to a beguiling close rather than serving as a warm-up throwaway, was superbly stylish and elegant in execution, the four players finding an ideal ensemble weight to serve their balanced, cleanly articulated and gently nuanced interpretation.

The evening’s rough spots were dispensed with at the start, in an overly aggressive reading of the Beethoven Quartet in F minor, Opus 95, wherein the group pressed its naturally light tone to the point of stridency and some scrambled ensemble.