MUSIC REVIEW : Chilingirian Quartet Opens Guild Season

On the occasion of its appearance on Wednesday to open the new season of Music Guild concerts in the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, the Chilingirian String Quartet faced up to one of the mightiest challenges in the repertory. Schubert’s vast Quartet in G, D. 887, is notorious locally for being programmed numerous times in recent seasons and ultimately replaced by less taxing--of performers and listeners--and familiar fare.

Schubert’s technical demands here make even those of the late-Beethoven quartets pale in comparison and it is structurally among the most intractable works in the repertory as well. This rapturous monster remains, however, one of the glories of Romantic chamber music, and the London-based ensemble--violinists Levon Chilingirian and Mark Butler, violist Louise Williams, cellist Philip De Groote--played it with a thrilling blend of rugged intensity and full-throated songfulness, boldly projecting its often grating harmonies even at the occasional expense--well-warranted--of ensemble elegance. All this in the face of nagging competition from the Ebell’s new,all-too-audible air-conditioning system.

With atmospheric problems successfully dealt with during intermission, musical problems surfaced during the evening’s second large work, the F-minor Piano Quintet of Brahms, which the quartet will repeat in Laguna Beach tonight.

Given Gerald Robbins’ self-effacing, unincisive pianism--an exception being his reasonably heated contribution to the Scherzo--at an instrument that seemed to be heard through several layers of cotton batting, Brahms was hardly given his due.

Under the circumstances, too much burden was placed on the strings, whose frequently strident, uncoordinated playing did not jibe with the secure, rich-toned and handsomely nuanced execution displayed in the big Schubert quartet and in the same composer’s brief, potent C-minor “Quartettsatz,” with which the very long evening had begun.

The Chilingirian String Quartet plays Brahms’ F-minor Piano Quintet plus Haydn’s Quartet in D, Opus 71, No. 2 and Prokofiev’s Quartet in F, Opus 92 tonight at 8 p.m. in the Laguna Beach High School Auditorium, 625 Park Ave., Laguna Beach. Tickets: $20. Presented by the Laguna Beach Chamber Music Society. Information: (714) 494-2822.