MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : A Little Too Perfect : Guarneri Cellist Says Students’ Playing Is ‘Rather Antiseptic’

From the vantage point of 28 years of playing together, dozens of recordings, critical praise as one of the three top quartets in the world and having inspired at least two books and a documentary film, the Guarneri String Quartet can serve as unique teachers to aspiring chamber groups.

For the past two years, in addition to frequent touring--the quartet plays tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre--the members have taught at the University of Maryland and other institutions. They find that student string players are “very, very good,” but they do have common problems, according to cellist David Soyer.

“They’re musically inhibited,” Soyer said in a recent phone interview from New York. “There’s a kind of sterility to their playing, which is note-perfect and clean but rather antiseptic.”

Soyer believes the younger generation has been unduly influenced by “a certain kind of literalism that came up in the time of Toscanini. He was extremely fussy in that sense.”

But even worse, “we live in an age where people don’t like to commit themselves and . . . it doesn’t take a lot of commitment to listen to that Baroque stuff, all those (composer names ending in) - inni’s and - elli’s. “

Soyer said he tries to counter that tendency in part by reviving some performance practices that have become unfashionable. For instance, “I try to encourage them in the use of portamento--glissandi, slides--however you want to put it--but with taste, not in a vulgar sense,” he said.

“When I was a student with Emanuel Feuermann, I remember, being a very brash kid, asking him why he used portamento so much. He was not taken aback by the question and said, ‘A cello is a not a clarinet. You just don’t stop holes. A singer slides between the notes, and as string players we attempt to copy them to make the instrument “sing,” to make the line fluent and supple.’ ”

But above all, he encourages students to pursue chamber-music careers “if they want to do that. Yes, one has to love and want to do it. You can’t bring up economic problems about getting a job. Students who ask, ‘Should I really become a musician?’ Those are the ones that should not.”

* The Guarneri String Quartet will play works by Haydn, Schubert and Dohnanyi today at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. The program is sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Orange County Philharmonic Society. A limited number of seats on stage are available at $18. (714) 646-6277.

THE NEW GUARD: One of the younger chamber-music groups is the Trio Fontenay, formed in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1980. The trio plays on Sunday at Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Few people realize how serious the effort is to play successfully as a piano trio, says 34-year-old cellist Nicklas Schmidt. “Even a number of very prominent musicians think that a trio is a kind of group they can do by coming together for fun,” he said in a phone interview from a tour stop in Kansas City, Mo.

“But so many groups stop after a year, once they begin finding that there is a big difficulty in getting the sound right between the piano and the strings. We’ve played for years with an open piano, and (pianist) Wolf (Harden) manages wonderfully never to be overbearing, too loud or getting the sound unbalanced.”

The trio, made up of Schmidt, Harden and violinist Michael Mucke, plays about 100 concerts a year, which is pushing it a bit. “I want less and Michael wants less, but Wolf wants more,” he said. “Less is a problem, of course, because there are so many nice things we still want to do. But touring, for me, is just too much. That may be my biggest problem.”

As with most chamber-group musicians, Schmidt likens playing in a trio to a marriage. “Some years are very difficult,” he said. “Others, just go, you know. When we had played together about six or seven years, things got hard, like in a marriage. It’s the same thing, but missing are the nice things in a marriage.”

Another problem is that both Harden and Mucke are experiencing the turning-30 crisis, which apparently is as big in Germany as it is in the Unites States.

“It’s a worldwide phenomenon,” Schmidt said. “I personally had lots of problems. You start to think over so many things. This is a time when everything is a little bit settled with your life. It’s clear that all of us are going to stay with the Trio, which is good, but it’s also a time to rethink everything you’ve done. . . . Everybody has to go through this special year.”

One of the things they’re re-evaluating are more than a dozen recordings they’ve made. “If we make a recording,” he said, “we of course put our all into it. . . .

“But then after all is done, if you play the work 10 more times in concert, you would like to do the recording again! You feel that everything is wrong. . . . It’s absolutely subjective. I never listen to them any more.”

* The Trio Fontenay will play Haydn’s “Gypsy” Trio, Brahms’ Trio in A Major and Dvorak’s Trio in G minor on Sunday at 4 p.m. in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $20. (714) 556-2787.