Music Reviews : Shostakovich Quartet Makes Local Debut at Schoenberg Hall

As debuts go, the concert Thursday evening was certainly little noted. Accountant’s conventions open with greater fanfare than greeted the Shostakovich Quartet. One could easily imagine that Moscow’s finest had hitchhiked into town, instead of arriving on their first U.S. tour, sponsored by the prestigious Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

But it will certainly be long remembered by the happy few in attendence at Schoenberg Hall, UCLA. The rest of you get another chance tonight, when the ensemble plays a second program.

The Shostakovich Quartet has a suave, versatile sound all its own, generally dark and soft-grained. It is capable of gruff muttering and heroic outbursts, of affecting song and taut discourse, all delivered with complete unanimity, well-blended and balanced but utterly transparent in texture.

Violinists Andrei Shishlov and Sergei Pishchugin, violist Alexander Galkovsky and cellist Alexander Korchagin brought with them big, unhackneyed programs of Russian music--most refreshing and stimulating in a season dominated by light and/or familiar repertory.

The centerpiece Thursday was the Quartet No. 4, Opus 49, by Vasili Lobanov, a Moscow colleague. It proved a discursive but formally rounded epic, tense and angry but also revealing flashes of ironic wit.

Lobanov’s style is undogmatically expressive, rooted in Shostakovich and Bartok. For all the emotional vehemence and coloristic bravura of the piece, his quartet is built on a single step-wise gesture, sometimes shrunk through microtonal inflections, sometimes displaced over octaves, chordally amplified or linked in melodic chains, but an obsessive, concentrating presence.

The ensemble played the draining work with unflagging energy and stern, often savage, authority. They take risks, but proved understandably well-versed in the manifold challenges.

Some of the ancestry of the Lobanov work could be heard in the rarely performed, remarkably forward-looking Quartet No. 1 by Borodin. The Scherzo, with its slashing vigor and stunning Trio in harmonics, and the Andante with its subtle modal variations and glorious part-writing, connected strongly with the rest of the agenda.

The Shostakovans began with their namesake’s Fourth Quartet, in a flowing reading that started in sonorous lyricism and grew into an intense debate. The deeply serious, slightly abstracted performance explored layers of subtexts while maintaining a placidly austere surface.

There was nothing austere about the encore, however. The now beaming musicians returned with Shostakovich’s “Age of Gold” Polka, in a gleefully hammy, sardonically explosive account.