MUSIC REVIEWS : TOKYO QUARTET PLAYS IN BUDDHIST TEMPLE

Anyone glancing at the performing area contrived for the Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo might have had doubts about whether this was a promising locale for the Sunday afternoon concert by the Tokyo String Quartet.

In place of a reflective backboard, the platform set up before the altar offered a deep, high stage with countless, irregularly shaped, gilded religious artifacts that one expected to sway and tinkle at any moment (they didn’t). Granted it was pretty--and in pleasingly odd contrast to the contemporary look of the light, natural woods of the audience area.

Doubts were dispelled with the duskily resonant opening measures of Schubert’s Quartet in E-flat, D. 87. The Da Camera Society had come up with another winning, if unlikely, locale for its Music in Historic Sites series. And there was some superb music-making, too.

The Tokyo Quartet--composed of violinists Peter Oundjian and Kikuei Ikeda, violist Kazuhide Isomura and cellist Sadao Harada--has enriched and intensified its ensemble personality in recent years.

Always among the world’s finest technicians, the Tokyo players are now also among its most expressive interpreters. The sweet, rounded, lightweight Tokyo trademark tone has gained heft without losing its clean lines. And, on this occasion, there was a good deal more rhythmic intensity and dynamic variety than one remembers from the days before Oundjian’s arrival as first violinist.

Interpretive fire was certainly needed to juice up the derivative music on the first half of the program: the wan, all too obviously Mozart-inspired piece by the 16-year-old Schubert, and Mendelssohn’s rather Beethovenish Quartet in A minor, Opus 13. In both works, it was the energetic, surpassingly articulate execution that gave pleasure.

With Beethoven’s first “Rasumovsky” Quartet--the work in F, Opus 59, No. 1--the artists had material worthy of their skills. It was a model performance: mechanically faultless, pure and strong in tone, exquisitely detailed. There are no throwaway passages when the Tokyo Quartet plays.