MUSIC REVIEWS : CHESTER QUARTET IN LOCAL DEBUT

Showing none of the effects of being eleventh-hour substitutes (for the American String Quartet), the Chester String Quartet made its local debut at the Wilshire Ebell on Wednesday.

Violinists Nicolas Danielson and Susan Freier, violist Ronald Gorevic and cellist Thomas Rosenberg combine to produce a pure, lightweight ensemble tone--no throbbing vibrato or thumping sforzandos for these young Americans--sophisticated in its employment of dynamic contrast for expressive ends.

The program was notable at the outset: for honoring Haydn and his dark, fiendishly difficult B-minor Quartet from Opus 33 by not using it as a warm-up. Shostakovich’s Quartet in D, Opus 83, No. 4, which requires a lower energy level, served that purpose admirably while introducing the Music Guild audience to one of the composer’s least glum, least stereotypical productions. Not a single gimpy waltz, acid polka or twittering at the top of the range cum spiccato motor galop. Rather, a good deal of low-key, gently melancholy lyricism.

Vibrato and dynamic scale were appropriately reduced for the Haydn, given a stylish, fleetly propulsive reading.

Mendelssohn’s youthful, fitfully compelling Quartet in A minor, Opus 13, came last and in less than perfect working order, with patches of ensemble imbalance and first-violin misintonation in the hard-driving first movement.

One must also question the wisdom of opening and concluding a program with works possessing die-away endings. It may just be pushing too hard to be different.