Music Reviews : Juilliard Quartet in Third Program of Beethoven Cycle

At once the most serious and lighthearted of Beethoven interpreters, the four members of the Juilliard Quartet bring no extra baggage to their performances. Their playing of the 16 quartets is full of thought, but not overintellectualized; it delves exhaustively in feelings without falling into a well of hysteria. Yet, to call these readings a middle road is to discount their depth and authority.

With Beethoven as well as other composers living and dead, the presently constituted Juilliard Quartet--violins Robert Mann and Joel Smirnoff, violist Samuel Rhodes and cellist Joel Krosnick--produces music unencumbered by affectation, preciosity or a misplaced sense of sobriety.

Consequently, as heard in the third installment of the ensemble’s current (October to May) cycle of Beethoven quartets at Ambassador Auditorium, the results are pristine and dramatic.

Literalism or sterility never appear in these readings. Every one of hundreds of interpretive decisions seems tied to, and meshed with, its fellows in a consistent viewpoint.

In the case of Opus 127, which occupied the first half of this program, those decisions related mostly to illuminating structure through careful but natural detailing.

What the work is “about” could fill volumes of analysis; what the composer requires it to sound like is more narrow.

Immaculate in execution until the final movement, goal-oriented in its emotional drive--like a hungry lover, the work proceeds urgently through its length, ending its searching only at the final cadence--this performance satisfied within those limits.

As the excellent program notes for this series pointed out, the works in each of Beethoven’s creative periods can be so dissimilar as to seem the product of different minds. The contrasts between the G-major quartet of Opus 18 and the E-minor Quartet of Opus 59, for instance, are startling. Yet the two works complement each other.

Wednesday, the Juilliard ensemble gave a potent but relaxed account of Opus 18, No. 2, one thoroughly well spoken and mechanically splendid. Because of its 43-year reputation for passionate playing, the ensemble’s technical achievement has sometimes been taken for granted; that is a serious oversight.

Finally, the Second “Rasumovsky” Quartet, in all its middle-aged earnestness, closed this event with the fervor one expects in the best Juilliard Quartet performances. Perhaps more smiles could have emerged in the finale, but it hardly mattered; in the effective heat of the moment, to question details seems foolish.