MUSIC REVIEW : Juilliard Begins Beethoven Cycle

The Juilliard String Quartet, which appeared at Ambassador Auditorium on Thursday for the first of five season-spanning concerts devoted to the complete quartets of Beethoven, has, in various personnel configurations, been putting on this show for four decades.

So the critical pulse hardly races in anticipation of yet another Juilliard go at the canonic 17. But it didn’t take long before Beethoven and the best Juilliard configuration ever--founding first violinist Robert Mann and his younger colleagues, second violinist Joel Smirnoff, violist Samuel Rhodes and cellist Joel Krosnick--made us willing captives.

To open, there was the quartet in F, Opus 18, No. 1. Its bluff joviality embraces a slow movement as intensely emotional as anything Beethoven ever created, although its formal clarity would give way to the less direct methods employed in the later works.

The creative perspiration of self-consciously deep works of Beethoven’s last period--such as the Quartet in A minor, Opus 132--was minimized by playing of uncommon sweetness and lightness of tone.

Finally, the performers backtracked to the composer’s middle period with the grandly self-assured, vivacious “Razumovsky” Quartet in C, Opus 59, No. 3.

If they lost some of their concentration here--the Minuet tended to wander--the precipitous finale offered that combination of ardor, technical aplomb and linear clarity that is the essence and particular joy of Juilliard.