MUSIC REVIEW : Mischa Ensemble in Season Finale

The art of chamber music performance requires the utmost familiarity among players, a blending and opposing and shaping of ideas that amounts to ballet on high-wire. That is why throwing a guest artist into the midst of an established ensemble is so often a mixed blessing.

Even when that guest artist is a chamber musician of the stature of pianist Menahem Pressler, who appeared Monday night with the core ensemble of the Music for Mischa series--violinists Joseph Genualdi and Miwako Watanabe, violist Michael Nowak and cellist Robert Martin.

The concert in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA marked the end of the fifth season for Mischa, which has rapidly established itself as one of the city’s top chamber series.

Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E-flat opened the concert, with Pressler offering an oversized reading in comparison with the trio of strings. Not only was his phrasing more ebullient and highly inflected, his tone richer than the rest of the ensemble, but he played louder too. One simply couldn’t hear the others properly. It wasn’t a question of selfishness, just one of balance and degree.

In Dvorak’s Piano Quintet, which concluded the program, Pressler and partners more closely matched each other in concept. This meant some really outgoing music making in the allegro movements, rich and heroic in timbre and accent. It meant an easy flow of melody in the Andante.

But the seams showed. The unselfishness of the playing and the underlining of the principal parts became obvious, as if each player were stepping into the spotlight to deliver a line of dialogue then stepping into shadow to listen for its answer. Accompanimental details stayed obscure, conversational feeling seemed hindered. There were moments of eloquence, to be sure, just not a polished ensemble profile.

That remained for the Mischa regulars to offer, in an intensely felt reading of Bartok’s Second String Quartet. The opening Moderato seethed and swooned in a single continuous arch. In the capricciosso second movement, the players savored the abrupt tempo changes--one sudden ritard sounded, aptly, like a power lawn mower moving into heavy grass--and effectively dovetailed fragments of phrases into single lines. Here, familiarity bred success.