Music Reviews : Audubon Quartet in Caltech Chamber Series

The Audubon Quartet and clarinetist David Shifrin presented a superbly nourishing concert on Sunday as their contribution to the Coleman chamber series at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium.

Their program listed Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet; the mellowest of Bartok’s quartets, his Fifth; and perhaps the mellowest work in the entire chamber repertoire, Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet.

Familiar music, but refreshed and refreshing at every turn, with not a casual (or overly studied) semiquaver within earshot. The Virginia-based ensemble--violinist David Ehrlich and David Salness, violist Doris Lederer, cellist Thomas Shaw--makes music with unfailing technical aplomb, vigor and intelligence.

Thus, their Mozart conveyed a floating quality, nowhere more apparent than in the scherzo’s airy trio, in which first violinist Ehrlich, bless him, resisted the usually succumbed-to temptation to gild the Mozartian gold with lavish portamento.

Bartok’s Fifth Quartet was set forth without the rhythmic ferocity and craggy articulation many ensembles--notably, these days, the Emerson Quartet and the Alban Berg Quartet--bring to the composer’s scores. Instead, the Audubon offered a more lyrical, less intense approach, rather like what one hears from the best Hungarian ensembles.

Rarely in this listener’s experience have the dazzling nocturnal twitterings of the work’s two slow movements been projected with clarity and point as they were on this occasion.

With Brahms’s Quintet, ensemble values were equally apparent. The commanding Shifrin chose not to dominate. He was one of five, in a relaxed, yet mobile reading: the work of artists in perfect, purposeful accord--with the sort of richly colored, dynamically subtle, effortless clarinet playing one might encounter in a particularly pleasant dream.