Music Reviews : Chamber Group Offers Messiaen ‘Quartet’

Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” is music that makes massive demands on performers, both technical and spiritual. A successful performance requires not only a foursome of virtuosos, but believers as well.

Monday night in Gindi Auditorium at the University of Judaism, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Chamber Music Society presented the work with a capable ensemble of Philharmonic musicians bravely attempting the nearly impossible.

Without undue effortfulness, the group--violinist Camille Avellano, cellist Barry Gold, clarinetist David Howard, pianist Gloria Cheng--successfully hurdled the work’s technical obstacles. But its mystical elements remained elusive.

The players brought considerable expressivity to most of the piece--this was not a cold run-through--yet, nevertheless, it fell short. The performance was typified by the group’s traversal of “Danse de la fureur,” its unison syncopated lines played with jazzy precision but missing the quality of “huge blocks of livid fury or ice-like frenzy” the composer seeks.

Gold offered the cello solo movement in one sweeping arch with an intriguingly varied vibrato, but his playing never reached the extatique heights called for in the score. Howard created expectancy in his movement, then denied it. Cheng pounded powerfully, and remained earthbound. This was a respectable, clearly laid out performance, just not an overwhelming one.

On the first half of the program, violinists Elizabeth Baker and Mitchell Newman, violist Meredith Snow and cellist Gloria Lum performed Debussy’s String Quartet. Again, the ensemble impressed most apparently from a technical standpoint: Taut phrasing, rhythmic exactness and unanimity of purpose characterized the reading. And though the performance emerged restrained emotionally, it seemed not entirely unsuited to the music--a valid approach, if not the approach.