MUSIC REVIEW : Cleveland Quartet in Program at Irvine Barclay

The Cleveland Quartet has been impressing audiences and critics in the Southland this week. So the temptation was to think that maybe a grueling tour was taking its toll when the players offered an enervated performance of Beethoven’s Opus 130 to close the formal part of a program Thursday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

But apparently not.

Recalled by the audience at the concert sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Orange County Philharmonic Society, the quartet--violinists William Preucil and Peter Salaff, violist James Dunham and cellist Paul Katz--responded with a buoyant, spirited account of the Scherzo from Dvorak’s Quartet No. 14 as an encore.

The conclusion, especially in light of a splendid reading of Prokofiev’s Quartet No. 1: The players seem to have more affinity for some works than for others.

Far from making Beethoven’s No. 13 a forward-looking opus, replete with tensions, extreme contrasts and even elements of the bucolic grotesquerie later more fully exploited by Mahler, the Clevelanders smoothed out the contrasts and sweetened the character.

Others have found the first movement a struggle between contemplation and activity, the brief Presto an on-the-edge confrontation with spectral obsession, the Andante a beguiling mix of tenderness and humor, the final movement (a substitute for the original Grosse Fuge) a paprika-flavored reassertion of life.

These players stressed evenness and continuity of temperament, burnished lyricism, hushed refinement. The deep inwardness of the Cavatina made the most persuasive case for their approach.

The quartet remained a model of ensemble, with unanimity of impulse, dynamic and phrasing. But one might have thought that this was one of Beethoven’s middle-period works, not one of his thorny, sublime late efforts.

In contrast, the players brought verve and rousing precision to Prokofiev’s lesser-known First Quartet. With shot-from-guns conviction, they loped through the composer’s brusque dance rhythms and lingered, probing, over his lyric if sometimes sardonic musings. One could imagine more tenderness and intimacy to come through in certain passages, but certainly this vital interpretation showed the quartet at its most masterful.

The Clevelanders opened the program with an impelled account of Mozart’s Quartet in G, K. 387, the first of the six quartets dedicated to Haydn. With a tendency toward brisk tempos and muscular phrasing, they gave themselves few opportunities to explore repose or grace or shifts of expression. They placed Mozart constantly in the sun, illuminated with many degrees of light, but set off with few deep shadows.