Music & Dance Reviews : New World Quartet at Wilshire Ebell

The New World String Quartet, among the best of the younger American ensembles, proved its mettle once again on the occasion of its Music Guild concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on Wednesday.

A hyper-familiar program--Smetana’s “From My Life,” the Bartok Fourth Quartet and the third of Beethoven’s “Rasumovsky” Quartets--hardly sent an anticipatory shiver up the reviewer’s spine. But eventually, after a reading of the Smetana marked more by good manners than idiomatic fire, one had to succumb to the collective skill and intelligence of violinists Curtis Macomber and Vahn Armstrong, violist Benjamin Simon and cellist Ross Harbaugh.

Their Bartok capitalized neither on febrile intensity nor rich sonority. It was, rather, an interpretation that stressed the virtues of clarity and cohesiveness while also exhibiting a measure of the Bartokian humor (e.g., in the pizzicato fourth movement) denied us by lusher-sounding specialist ensembles.

It was, however, in the Beethoven Quartet in C, Opus 59, No. 3, that the players seemed most in their element: as classicists. Their work there proved sweet in tone, rhythmically lively and stylishly, un-Romantically straightforward in all interpretive aspects.

One wishes them a speedy return, bringing, perhaps, some Mozart--ideally the string quintets.