JUILLIARD STRING QUARTET AT AMBASSADOR AUDITORIUM

On Thursday, the Juilliard String Quartet, in the second of three appearances this season at Ambassador Auditorium, Pasadena, demonstrated the art of ensemble playing at its most accomplished and communicative.

Whether it was the recent acquisition of a new member (second violinist Joel Smirnoff), the presence of a large and judiciously receptive audience, or some mystic alignment of heavenly bodies, the Juilliard played with a degree of expressive warmth, balanced, synchronous tone, and controlled intensity not heard from them in recent seasons.

The innocent pleasures of Mendelssohn’s Quartet in E-flat, Opus 12, were gracefully conveyed with--where most needed, in the rambling finale--a fittingly terse rhythmicality.

There is nothing benign or even faintly attractive about the Second Quartet (1951) of Roger Sessions: an unrelentingly grim contrapuntal exercise, impossible to pin down as the work of any specific composer of any specific nationality, with its agonized chromaticism, knotty fugues and extended 12-tone episodes.

One listened, nonetheless, transfixed--not so much by Sessions’ workmanship as by the color and clarity of the ensemble’s execution.

These artists--violinists Robert Mann and Smirnoff, violist Samuel Rhodes and cellist Joel Krosnick--may be able to dish out the familiar measures of the Debussy Quartet with only half the collective mind engaged, but they chose on this occasion to give it their best--in terms of dynamic subtlety (the extended ensemble pianissimo at the end of the third movement occasioned a few audible gasps from the audience), sonority (delicate to near-orchestral, always solid and handsome) and rhythmic drive.

Superquartet is back.