MUSIC REVIEWS : AN DIE MUSIK ENSEMBLE AT CALTECH

For about a century and a half, “An die Musik” has referred to Schubert’s song based on a poem by Schober. In the last decade, however, the titled has been annexed, not inappropriately, by a chamber music quintet presumably to indicate its tribute to the noble art of music.

As a performing group, An die Musik--consisting of Timothy Baker, violin; Richard Brice, viola; Daniel Rothmuller, cello; Gerard Reuter, oboe, and Constance Emmerich, piano--displays no favoritism. At the penultimate Coleman Chamber Concert of the season, in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech Sunday afternoon, it dutifully played a brief novelty by the Polish-born composer, Jerzy Sapieyevski, and paid respectful obeisance to Mozart and Brahms.

In contrast to the customary complaint of a lack of rehearsal, the group activities suggested over- rather than under-rehearsal. Natural flow and spontaneity were submerged in painstaking attention to minute detail. The music had been microscopically scanned for intimate nuance, all very pleasant and now and then illuminating, but rarely contributing to propulsion.

The effect was not exactly academic, but neither did it generate much urgency. Reuter’s oboe took over the first half of the program. In Sapieyevski’s “Aria,” written for the An die Musik ensemble, it wound its way in and around a kind of bird music, not unattractive, but also not very original. Both oboe and strings drained Mozart’s Quartet in F, K. 370, of its charm and ingenuity, but only in the finale let the composer take the lead in rhythmic bounce.

Brahms’ Quartet in C minor, Opus 60, aroused strings and piano from the cautionary stance with a certain amount of rugged abandon that still did not fully pay Brahms his due.