MUSIC REVIEW : GUARNERI QUARTET AT AMBASSADOR

The Guarneri Quartet at the top of its form, as it most emphatically was at Ambassador Auditorium on Thursday, has no peer today in terms of sheer beauty of sound--a sugar-and-cream sound that violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree and cellist David Soyer have been producing for 20 years.

On Thursday, the players also did what they do not always do: play with a degree of passion that probes well beyond the sonic surface to create a deeply satisfying musical experience--and out of unlikely raw material.

There were no traditional “towering masterpieces” on a program that spent its hourlong pre-intermission portion on composers sounding like other composers: Mendelssohn, in his Quartet in E-flat, Opus 44, No. 3--attempting to unleash the dramatic rage of Beethoven--and Beethoven, in his youthful Serenade in D for string trio--unable to exorcise the ghost of Haydn. Yet the Guarneri made us hang on every note.

The Mendelssohn was attacked with becoming fury and sonorousness, but lightened exquisitely for the inevitable faerie scherzo (with fugal excursions) and an arching slow movement cribbed from Beethoven’s “Harp” Quartet.

As happens often at the outset of a Guarneri concert, one heard a bit too much of second violinist Dalley’s large, succulent tone while first violinist Steinhardt adjusted his smaller, sweeter sound. But balance was quickly established, Dalley assuming his appointed place with dignity.

Steinhardt relinquished his chair to Dalley for Beethoven’s garrulous, doggedly jolly Serenade, giving Dalley every opportunity to shine. He and colleagues Tree and Soyer produced an interpretation whose combination of elegance and brawniness minimized the longueurs of the young composer’s effortful exercise in being innocently diverting.

The program concluded with one of the marvels of Dvorak’s middle years, the Quartet in C, Opus 61, which also happens to be one of the interpretive marvels of the Guarneri’s middle period--a work they revived with notable success a dozen years ago and return to now, not as jaded veterans but as seasoned, humane masters, more than ever able to illuminate the music’s vast, gorgeous lyrical spans and tersely inflected folk-dance tunes.