Music Reviews : Vermeer Shines With Shostakovich

For about 12 minutes--the duration of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh String Quartet--on Wednesday evening the Vermeer Quartet ranked among the chamber music elite.

Which is not to deny the veteran ensemble’s other positive achievements in the course of delivering a well-balanced program in the Leo S. Bing Theater. Rather, that for those few tense, taut minutes of piercing Russian soulfulness, the Vermeer--violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi and Pierre Menard, violist Richard Young, cellist Marc Johnson--functioned in perfect technical and spiritual accord, as messenger and extension of the music.

The work itself, written in 1960 as a memorial to the composer’s first wife, might at first be taken for another of Shostakovich’s clever-nasty little jokes. But the suggestion of whimsy turns quickly to brooding, remaining so until anger erupts at the slashing outset of the third of its tiny, perfectly formed movements, finally to dissolve in a muted, despairing recollection of the lively opening C-sharp minor theme.

Elsewhere, the evening offered a mix of strong impulses--the playing was rhythmically alive throughout--with patchy realization.

The tender meanderings of Mendelssohn’s Quartet in E flat, Opus 12, an early, innocent example of cyclical style neatly balanced by Shostakovich’s more portentous use of the same technique, were compromised by Ashkenasi’s dogged employment of one of the widest vibratos in the business and his occasional intonational lapses.

But if the Beethoven Opus 127 Quartet, also in E flat, showed ensemble inconsistencies--for example, the first violinist’s spacious, portamento announcement of the Adagio’s opening theme answered (nominally) by its detached-note statement in the cello--the composer’s refusal to let any instrument dominate brought out the considerable individual strengths of the players.