Music Reviews : Lindsay String Quartet Premieres Tippett Work

Sunday evening in Schoenberg Hall, the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts offered the perfect complement to the genre-busting experimentalism of the Kronos Quartet, heard two days earlier at Wadsworth Theater. In the suitably intimate environment of the campus hall, the Lindsay String Quartet demonstrated more traditional power and glory in their rich, unamplified and highly personalized playing.

The Lindsay even had a premiere of its own, giving the first local performance of Michael Tippett’s substantial, enthralling Quartet No. 5. This is big, serious music, conceptually based on late Beethoven.

The complexity of Tippett’s forms and motivic developments do not preclude passion, lyricism and charm presented in sophisticated but readily accessible style.

Tippett’s quartets are a specialty of the British ensemble, which has recorded the previous four. Violinists Peter Cropper and Ronald Birks, violist Robin Ireland and cellist Bernard Gregor-Smith are quite unfazed by the composer’s sudden shifts of mood and texture, articulation and dynamics. They play this music with vivid color, in a clearly well-thought, deeply-felt and integrated interpretation.

But then this is not a group from which unconsidered, generic playing can be expected even in the most familiar music. It was obvious from the first, uncommonly fluid bars of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet that this would be no stock effort. Some elements--Cropper’s flirtatious way with the tune early in the Andante, for example--sounded unconvincing, and the group could overplay other passages into hectoring frenzy.

But the flaws in the account were the product of welcome independence and creativity, and quite overshadowed by the freshness of the interpretation and the boldness of the playing.

Opening the canny program was one of Haydn’s masterpieces of bent inspiration, the Quartet in C, Opus 20, No. 2. Here the Lindsay sound was maybe too plush and pliable, their phrasing distinctive but overly massaged. This was Haydn from a Romantic perspective, emotionally fierce but sonically overheated, and structurally fuzzy around the unconventional center.