Music Reviews : String Quartet Offers Ives Program

Ives’ String Quartet No. 1 can evoke a sense of shared Yankee experience--it is titled, after all, “A Revival Service”--but it also can suggest the dissolution of such communal sensibility and our distance from it.

These contradictory characteristics were strongly exploited by the New York-based Mendelssohn String Quartet, which played the work as part of a splendid concert, the final event of the 32nd season of the Laguna Chamber Music Society, Tuesday at Laguna Beach High School.

With an uncanny combination of fervor and sweetness, with eminent sense of proportion and control, violinists Ida Levin and Nicholas Mann, violist Katherine Murdock and cellist Marcy Rosen traversed Ives’ not-so-simple hymn-based composition, his first major work, composed in 1896 but not performed until 1957 nor published until 1961.

From Rosen’s direct and plaintive opening tune, through the later surging, lopping melodies to the big, lush tremolo close, the players kept you thinking, feeling and guessing.

Was Ives being naive and innocent or faux- naive or even critical as he quoted, extended or manipulated these hymns? Or maybe all of the above?

The players made a case for each possibility, at least at different moments, suggesting that they had deeply absorbed the music while we may have not yet come fully come to terms with it, even though--despite Mann’s introductory comments to ease the way--it proved relatively mild to contemporary ears.

Joined by guest artists violist Brian Dembow and cellist Ronald Leonard, the quartet members overcame a coolish, broad and sturdy start to offer a strong and passionate account of Brahms’ String Sextet in B-flat, Opus 18.

With robust tone and sensitive playing, the players responded to the composer’s expressive demands, although one might have wished for the variations in the Andante to be more demarcated so that the cumulative effect would have been more dramatic.

They opened the program with a sunny performance of Haydn’s Quartet in B-flat, Opus 64, No. 3, one of the “Tost” Quartets. Bright in sound, affable in balance and exchanging of themes, the players proved impressive with their pressureless starts and overall tight, unified ensemble, despite moments of edgy pitch.