Music Reviews : Endellion Quartet Plays Founders Hall

The Endellion String Quartet, which appeared Sunday afternoon in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, is an ensemble very easy to admire.

Its tone is rich and weighty, based firmly upon David Waterman’s dark, plump cello timbre. Execution on an individual level is next to faultless, and ensemblewise, the players seem a perfect match: They achieve an impressive unity in both spirit and mechanics.

But Sunday, in offering ultra-polished and ultra-refined performances of quartets by Haydn, Britten and Beethoven--an almost identical program is scheduled for the Music Guild on Wednesday at Wilshire Ebell Theater and Thursday at Pierce College--the group left room to disagree with its stylistic decisions.

Haydn’s String Quartet Opus 71, No. 2, was offered in a lustrous and forcefully articulated reading, the players providing evenhanded phrasing and liberal amounts of vibrato. One missed a lilt in the rhythm, a pointedness to the utterance.

The British quartet--Andrew Watkinson and Ralph de Souza, violins; Garfield Jackson, viola; and Waterman, cello--has long been associated with the music of Benjamin Britten. Its performance of the String Quartet No. 3 from 1975 revealed a fluidity of argument, ease of execution and judicious refusal to pursue effect for effect’s sake indicative of this familiarity.

Still, its easiness nagged. Marked by the composer as piano, the high-range violin solo at the heart of the work was taken at a safe mezzo-forte. Britten’s direction to play “roughly” in the Burlesque was interpreted as merely garden-variety vigor.

Beethoven’s String Quartet Opus 59, No. 3, fared best, in a forcefully declaimed yet luminous reading. Here, the gravity of the playing, its solidity and square-jawed drama, matched that of the music. A plush and elegant account of a Dvorak Waltz was given in encore.