Music Reviews : Guarneri Quartet at Ambassador

The Guarneri Quartet played a program of Mozart, Beethoven and Debussy before a large, appreciative audience at Ambassador Auditorium on Saturday.

That sentence--with only the venue changing--has been written countless times, occasionally with wry intent. Which is to say there may have been advance grumbling at the hyperfamiliar repertory, with its overtones of road-show business as usual.

And there may have been disappointment at the choice of this specific Mozart, the “Dissonant” Quartet, of which we’ve had seven prior performances locally this year, while a half-dozen other major Mozart quartets were neglected. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

But by midpoint of the slow movement of the “Dissonant,” even a resident kvetch had to capitulate, as ever, to what remains after a quarter-century-plus the most purely gorgeous, homogeneous sound in quartetdom, emanating from the unchanging, if not quite ageless, team of violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree and cellist David Soyer.

In Beethoven’s String Trio in G Dalley took the sole violin part, indicating again that if the two violinists (Dalley plays second) were to trade places it would not substantially alter the quartet’s overall sound or lower its level of proficiency.

For the Debussy Quartet one wouldn’t have wanted anything changed and, perhaps, it hasn’t in 27 years with the exception of tempo, that chosen for the opening movement on this occasion seeming brisker than usual.

The Guarneri’s Debussy remains the ultimate aural bath, immersing even the most resistant listener in the sensuous suggestiveness of the score and the plush sonorities that are quintessentially, incomparably Guarneri.