MUSIC REVIEW : Colorado Quartet Plays Shostakovich in Laguna Beach

In a serious and generous program Wednesday night for the Laguna Beach Chamber Music Society, the Colorado Quartet gave the place of honor, and its greatest attention, to Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 5. The resulting performance formed a peak of musical concentration and technical prowess not reached in the ensemble’s playing of works by Haydn and Beethoven before and after.

For some listeners, there might be a certain amount of disorientation in hearing a group named for the state of Colorado, though its members are actually residents of New Jersey, just two weeks after hearing an ensemble genuinely resident in Colorado--the Takacs Quartet--but bearing Hungarian credentials. The Laguna Beach audience seemed to take it all in stride and listened with rapt attention to the present visitors.

Shostakovich’s 1952 quartet, written in the same period as the Ninth and Tenth symphonies, repays such attentiveness. Kaleidoscopic in its emotional range, it seems often to touch down on depths unacknowledged in some other works by this composer.

The accomplished Colorado Quartet--violins Julie Rosenfeld and Deborah Redding, violist Francesca Martin and cellist Sharon Prater--kept the freewheeling aural narrative on course in a structurally integrated, virtually immaculate reading combining vigor and vulnerability.

Earlier, their approach to Haydn’s Quartet in E-flat, Opus 50, No. 3, seemed unduly coarse and overstated, a peasant’s view of the castle. It was also, more often than not, over loud.

In Beethoven’s Third “Rasumovsky” Quartet, more contrasts came to the fore, but not until after an opening movement troubled by rhythmic instability, problems of balance and dynamics, and an unfocused architectonic plan. Things began to come together in the Andante and Menuetto and reached a high point of energy and pleasure in the finale.

The Colorado Quartet appears tonight at the downtown Los Angeles campus of Mt. St. Mary’s College, Saturday at UC Riverside and Sunday afternoon on the Coleman Concerts series in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech in Pasadena.