Music Reviews : Juilliard String Quartet

The prospect of dredging up adjectives with which to praise the Juilliard String Quartet at the top of its form has become wearying, although “probing, lush-toned, technically masterful” could easily be recycled to describe their playing of the Beethoven Quartet in B flat, Opus 130, on Sunday afternoon at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium.

What went awry in their encounter with the Second Quartet of Leos Janacek is a good deal easier to describe.

While Janacek’s knotty textures were clarified to a quite remarkable degree by these brilliant and brainy artists, there were too many slips to make this disjunct, ferocious, moonstruck but by no means incoherent thriller achieve its full impact on Sunday.

First violinist Robert Mann encountered intonational difficulties in the opening movement; in the finale, second violinist Joel Smirnoff scrambled his strummings on their first appearance whereas they were swamped by Joel Krosnick’s cello--which elsewhere proved uncharacteristically faint-toned--the second time around. Leaving only Samuel Rhodes’ succulent viola playing unscathed amid the Juilliard’s losing battle with Janacek.

Then, too, the excitement of the first movement--and thereby of the work as a whole--peaked too early. This is, after all, music in which climaxes are as common as crescendos in other composers’ creations.

The program opened with a jaunty, not-quite-elegant traversal of Haydn’s Quartet in G, Opus 77, No. 1, and the Coleman Concerts audience was sent home happy with Beethoven’s aforementioned Opus 130, with its brief, jolly second ending rather than the massive, nerve-rattling “Grosse Fuge.”