MUSIC REVIEWS : Tokyo String Quartet Opens Coleman Concerts Season

The Tokyo String Quartet has a long and steady relationship with the venerable Coleman Chamber Concerts in Pasadena, going back to 1971 and a win in the Coleman Competition. Sunday afternoon at Beckman Auditorium, the ensemble opened the 89th Coleman season with a dauntingly complex program.

Remarkably, the Beethoven-Berg-Beethoven program originated with the staunchly conservative presenters rather than the performers, as first violinist Peter Oundjian announced in comments before the Berg. A few members of the audience availed themselves of the opportunity to depart for an early intermission, but the remainder listened raptly to as expressive an account of Berg’s Opus 3 Quartet as could be imagined.

The Tokyo way with it emphasized the motivic permutations, as a sort of highly integrated thematic daisy-chain. The thoroughly unified independence of the ensemble playing presented the contrapuntal mazes with clarity, while individual bravura maintained the passion of its mysteries.

The romantic sweep of the piece is seldom presented with such intense conviction, regardless of context. Here Berg’s inventive, eloquent ways and means gained added power and uncommon accessibility through the program, launched with Beethoven’s deceptively compressed final quartet, Opus 135.

Not that the performance began on the rarefied level met in the Berg. The Tokyo--Oundjian and Kikuei Ikeda, violins; Kazuhide Isomura, viola; Sadao Harada, cello--needed much of the piece to warm up individually and collectively.

When they did, however, the piece glowed. The fabled security of the Tokyo playing sometimes hides the risks so effectively taken, as in the pointed conversational exchanges, goosed with subtle rhythmic inflections.

At the end of the program came the first of Beethoven’s Opus 59, “Rasumovsky” Quartets, in F as is Opus 135. The first movement sounded unusually stern, but athleticism and sardonic humor tempered the severity in the Allegretto, and a whole new world blossomed in the Adagio. Refined charm characterized the finale, more mellow than merry.

The ensemble put its versatility on display in encore, offering a crisp and colorful account of the second movement from Debussy’s Quartet.