MUSIC REVIEWS : SEQUOIA AND FRIENDS

For more than a decade, the Sequoia Quartet has been a wonderful throwback, an intense little music-making community apparently immune to contemporary pressures. Now, personnel changes seem to be seasonal--in fact, the ensemble soon begins an indefinite sabbatical.

On Sunday evening, the latest lineup, plus four friends, presented the fourth program on the “Age of Romanticism” series at the Getty Museum in Malibu

This installment was titled “Symphonic Chamber Music.” Musicologist Robert Winter supplied the large crowd with many details regarding socio-musical changes in the early 19th Century. For him, however, symphonic appears simply to mean grander dimensions and more diffuse textures, in which case symphonies themselves became more “symphonic,” compared to Classical predecessors.

At any rate, Schumann’s first Quartet, in A minor, does not sound any more “symphonic” in relation to his own symphonies than Haydn’s quartets do in relation to his . Rather less, in fact. And that despite a large-scaled, outgoing effort by violinists Peter Marsh and Miwako Watanabe, cellist Bonnie Hampton and a temporary Sequoian, violist Brian Dembow.

The Getty’s Inner Peristyle Garden, with its covered performing deck, certainly provides an elegant and relatively supportive environment for outdoor music-making. The Sequoians played with generally well-balanced power and verve, exaggerating dynamic and articulative nuances a bit, but projecting a much more exciting personality than has often been apparent in the recent past.

After intermission, the Sequoians were joined by Gary Gray, clarinet; Michael O’Donovan, bassoon; Richard Todd, horn, and Bruce Morgenthaler, string bass, in a lustrous reading of Schubert’s genuinely epic Octet. Gray and Marsh dueled over pitch, tempo, and phrasing at many points, but their partnership in the slow movement was elegantly spun and poised.