Music Reviews : Ysaye Quartet Performs for Guild at Ebell

Trailing some impressive competition victories and appearances at European festivals, the youthful, Paris-based Ysaye String Quartet (named after the founder of the Franco-Belgian school of string playing) made its local debut in a Music Guild program at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on Wednesday.

It was an evening of standard repertory--Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet, Schubert’s Quartet in A minor, D. 804, and Debussy’s sole effort in the medium--that stretched at least one listener’s patience to the breaking point.

These are skilled players, to be sure, fastidious about internal balances and purity of intonation. One could dismiss, if not excuse, their porcelain-figurine approach to the opening Mozart; that is, the sort of Romantic misrepresentation of the composer common even among the most experienced ensembles in the business.

But when the Ysayes--violinists Christophe Giovaninetti and Luc-Marie Aguera, violist Miguel Da Silva, cellist Michel Poulet--applied the same sweet/soft-toned, sempre legato, underemphatic approach to Schubert (where the cello courted inaudibility, consciously it seemed), Debussy and a Haydn minuet, offered as encore, one felt as if being bludgeoned by feathers.

It is difficult to recall a recent instance of such dogged desire to avoid stimulation, or of technical polish being employed to so little artistic purpose.