Music Reviews : Ames Piano Quartet Plays Coleman Concert

One waited in vain for signs of life at the concert given by the Ames Piano Quartet in Beckman Auditorium on Sunday.

The group, in residence at Iowa State University in Ames, could be called accomplished. But that would be saying little more than that four musically trained accountants (no slight on that profession intended) would have lacked the mechanical skills to play quartets of Mozart, Martinu and Faure as well as these people.

The Ames four--pianist William David, violinist Mahlon Darlington, violist Laurence Burkhalter, cellist George Work--showed minimal engagement for an ensemble of music professionals displaying its wares before a sophisticated Coleman Chamber Concerts audience.

The three substantial works programmed progressed in uniformly small-scale, stylistically undifferentiated fashion. The cello’s frequent inaudibility compromised internal balance, while the violinist provided the wrong kind of distraction with his habit of attacking notes from below. The pianist dutifully, more often than not softly, played continuo.

Rhythms lacked definition, above all in Martinu’s 1942 Quartet, which when delivered as underemphatically, with as little push and edginess as it was on Sunday, emerges as mere busywork.

Mozart’s G-minor Quartet, which opened the proceedings, suffered a reduction in scale: the don’t-make-waves school of Mozart interpretation.

Faure’s Quartet in C minor concluded then, its undulating, perfumed measures delivered with such earthbound rectitude as to suggest that the players were conveying not the composer’s subtle Gallic sensuality but the flat landscape of their Iowan homeland.