MUSIC REVIEW : Da Vinci Quartet, Friends at Pierce College

On paper the program for the Da Vinci String Quartet and friends looked fascinating enough. But perhaps most startling in the event, Tuesday at the Performing Arts Building of Pierce College, was the night-and-day aspect of its presentation.

Dawn came after intermission with Chausson’s rarely encountered “Chanson perpetuelle,” a hothouse account of an abandoned woman’s ardent embrace of Death. The pressure off, the young ensemble--no relation to the Da Vinci Piano Quartet--relaxed into mellow accompaniment, guided by the sensitive, veteran skills of pianist Armen Guzelimian.

The soloist was mezzo Claudine Carlson. She provided long, liquid lines and even production in clearly congenial and comfortable music. She caught the chill, central moment of abandonment with poignantly soft and fuzzy sound, and then built the implausible raptures of suicide with radiant ease.

For a closer, the Da Vincis replaced the scheduled Dvorak with Mendelssohn’s E-flat Quartet, Opus 44, No. 3, which they have recently recorded. It proved a wise decision in the taut, confident playing, brimming with thrust and color. Violinists Jerilyn Jorgensen and Carol Jenkins, violist Margaret Miller and cellist Katharine Knight worked a lithe, expressive but not overstated interpretation with conviction and security.

They faded badly in the finale, but then so did the composer, and their tired scramble to the end may have merely met the music on its own terms.

That wasn’t the case with Beethoven’s B-flat Quartet, No. 6 of the Opus 18 set. The Da Vincis seemed nervous and tentative throughout their technically unstable opening performance. They did offer some glimpses of its quirky wonders, but for the most part any serious thinking about the piece was subordinated to an unsettling struggle for ensemble survival.

After that crisis, even Carlson seemed to be holding back in Brahms’ two Opus 91 lieder. The low-lying passages exposed a severe register break, and she settled for a kind of generalized reverie interpretively.

Violist Miller matched Carlson’s warmth, but not her accuracy, in unintegrated readings anchored by Guzelimian’s unflappable pianism. Under the circumstances, the programming rationale seemed purely a matter of ad-hoc opportunity.

The Music Guild program was scheduled to be repeated Wednesday at the Wilshire Ebell Theater.