MUSIC REVIEWS : VERMEER QUARTET AT WILSHIRE EBELL

Everything tends to be writ large when the Chicago-based Vermeer Quartet plays, as on Wednesday in the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. With these accomplished veterans there is no mincing, no fancy stylistic considerations.

Thus, in Haydn’s Quartet in D, Opus 76, No. 1, there was more aggressiveness than humor or formal elegance--and an excess of portamento playing. One did, however, get a whopping earful of tone: a large, vibrant sonority which, in spite of its questionable suitability to the music at hand, proved impossible to deny.

It is a sound made to order for the mercurial, rarely heard First Quartet of Janacek--subtitled “Kreutzer Sonata,” after Tolstoy’s novella. This, the Vermeer--violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi and Pierre Menard, violist Richard Young, cellist Marc Johnson--played with optimum linear clarity and all the Slavic soul the composer could have desired.

We’ve heard Beethoven’s vast A-minor Quartet, Opus 132, a few times too often lately and, by the sound of it on Wednesday, these artists have played it either a few times too often or infrequently. It did not fare well.

Beethoven was rather rudely cuffed about, with too ample a residue of the Janacek tension and too few glimpses of the beauty of tone expected of the Vermeer.

It was also a disjointed performance, distractingly full of unwarranted ritardandos and accelerandos , until the finale, when Ashkenasi decided to pull out the Romantic stops and apply some pressure on himself and his colleagues to bring Beethoven’s penultimate quartet--and, overall, the most satisfying Music Guild season within memory--to a soaring, rousing, lush-toned, coherent conclusion.