Music Reviews : Golabek Guests With Cleveland Quartet

While the Cleveland Quartet might have provided a wider stylistic range in the repertory offered at its concert in the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre on Wednesday--the Music Guild audience is a good deal more sophisticated than its programmers would have us believe--the level of performance was high enough to silence the grumblers. Most of them, anyway.

With occasional competition from some bravura coughers in the hall, the Clevelanders--violinists William Preucil and Peter Salaff, violist James Dunham, cellist Paul Katz--plumbed the depths of Haydn’s sublime Quartet in D, Opus 76, No. 5, without ignoring its knife-edge wit.

The players projected a light, tight but never insubstantial ensemble sonority, with just enough vibrato to make the instruments--and Haydn’s lines--resonate.

In the subsequent A-minor Quartet of Brahms, accretions of sonority and intensity, within an extended dynamic range, strikingly illustrated the historical and expressive differences between Brahms and Haydn. But this remained Brahms with firm rhythmic underpinning and without dramatic excess.

Although the listener is unlikely ever to confuse Dvorak’s limber, natural flow with Brahms’ strenuousness, the two composers, friends and contemporaries, do share certain emotional and harmonic views. Thus, the program might have jettisoned Brahms for a different era and viewpoint.

At any rate, one wouldn’t have wanted to be without Dvorak’s Opus 81 Piano Quintet, which concluded the evening with stomping, whirling vivacity.

Here the quartet provided its grandest, most luscious sonorities, with pianist Mona Golabek, a valuable local artist too seldom heard from in recent years, a fluent, characterful fifth member, commandingly soloistic or integral to the ensemble fabric, according to the dictates of the score.

It was not the most orderly string playing within memory. But perhaps that isn’t what Dvorak’s quintet is about. The Clevelanders’ spontaneous-sounding, all-emotional-stops-out effort gave a more accurate impression of the music’s motivating spirit than would have been the case with a glossier, more tautly controlled performance.