MUSIC REVIEW : Smithson Opens Nakamichi Festival

It looked interesting on paper: the kickoff on Wednesday of the Nakamichi Baroque Festival, devoted (mainly) to Mozart under the influence of the past, reconciling the rigors of fugal style with his own fanciful way of saying things.

As presented in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA by the period-instrument Smithson String Quartet, the program made some powerful points, if not always the ones intended. The principal pleasure involved the most familiar music, Mozart’s Quartet in G, K. 387--for once the culmination and climax of a concert rather than its disposable opening work. Its finale is a fugue, but thematically purest Mozart.

In the shapely, energetic reading by the Smithson--violinists Jaap Schroeder and Marilyn McDonald, violist Judson Griffin, cellist Kenneth Slowik--it emerged fresh and unaccustomedly powerful, its melodic inspiration so consistent, its part-writing so much more sophisticated than what had preceded it.

The 16-year-old Mozart’s darkly subversive Quartet in D minor, K. 173--which has a fugal finale--was the burnt opening offering: rushed, top-heavy and, particularly in the first movement, rough, with the otherwise commanding Schroeder emitting more than a few squawks in place of tuned phrases.

Two uncharacteristically glum works from the period of K. 387, Mozart’s middle age (he was 26), completed his portion of the program--the D-minor and G minor Preludes and Fugues for trio. Academic interests may have been served by this sop to the Baroque Mozart theme, but listener concentration was sorely tested, despite the players’ dedicated efforts.

Finally, there was Haydn, his rare Quartet in C, Opus 20, No. 2, which influenced Mozart, of course, and whose finale is--surprise!--a fugue. But its blazing heart is the slow movement, a heaven-sent melody (emphasizing the cello part, delineated with exquisite finesse by Slowik) persistently undermined by fierce, declamatory outbursts, as if this were some operatic scena for a vengeful, wronged soprano.