‘SEQUOIA & FRIENDS’ IN NEW SEASON

It was another season, another beginning--with a new member, cellist Bonnie Hampton--for the Sequoia String Quartet on Sunday afternoon at the Japan America Theatre.

Hampton joins first violinist Peter Marsh, himself only in his second year with the group, and two of the steadiest, most accomplished players in the business: Sequoia veterans Miwako Watanabe, the second violinist, and violist James Dunham.

Whatever problems recent personnel eruptions may have wrought were not apparent at Sunday’s concert, as cohesive and stimulating a session as the Sequoia--whatever its makeup--has ever given us.

The players sounded comfortable with each other. Ensemble blend was admirable--in terms of tone, dynamics and interpretive stance--in a program that began with a breezily stylish reading of Mozart’s Quartet in G, K. 387, in which the players honored both the music and their audience by arriving fully prepared and fully engaged, rather than using the Classical piece to get the kinks out for the “weightier” stuff to come.

As it happened, the subsequent Opus 3 Quartet of Alban Berg proved remarkably un-weighty on this occasion, its rather quaint “febrile intensity,” replete with haunted-house tremolos and sul ponticello keenings, part of a brisk, well-tooled interpretation that did not take the music too seriously.

The showpiece of this Sequoia String Quartet and Friends program was Dvorak’s Quintet in A, Opus 81, with a visitor from the Bay Area, pianist Nathan Schwartz, adding his energetic, incisive voice to an utterly beguiling performance.

Dvorak may have been played more neatly and with more control in these parts (the passionate outbursts in the “Dumka” movement threatened to run away with themselves), but rarely with such tingling, whirling rhythmicality and effusive lyricism. It was Sequoia and Friend working as an inspired team.