MUSIC REVIEWS : Ysaye Quartet Shines at Pierce College

Heading into the home stretch of a three-week, 15-concert North American tour, the 9-year-old Ysaye Quartet played a safe program at Pierce College in Woodland Hills Tuesday night.

Composed of four young Frenchmen--violinists Christophe Giovaninetti and Luc-Marie Aguera, violist Miguel da Silva and cellist Michel Poulet--but named after a great Belgian violinist, the Quartet brought to music by Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and Ravel an impressive combination of precise intonation, seamless ensemble and intense color.

The familiar Ravel work, making up the second half, was by far the evening’s highlight, as the Quartet chose clear-headed detail work over passionate impressionism, creating in the process a tightly focused, glittering jewel of a performance in which solos by Da Silva and Poulet were dazzling.

After a deadpan reading of the opening bars, the suddenly rapt playing of the second subject signaled that here was something special, Giovaninetti’s solidly in-tune, immaculate phrasing in particular indicating the presence of a major artist. Only the Quartet’s weak responses to the occasional requirements of aggressive physicality, such as the big pizzicato outbursts in the second movement, let the side down.

The Ysaye’s sterling qualities, however, did little for Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 13 Quartet, which led off the program and needed a more assertive approach to mold the 18-year-old composer’s coy emotions into something other than mere prettiness.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s increasingly popular Eighth Quartet, which followed, fared better. Featuring gorgeous solo work by Poulet, the Quartet’s restraint and elegance imparted to the Angst- ridden work an unexpected but hardly inappropriate introspection that contrasted refreshingly with the usual, heavy-handed Slavic approach that has come to be its due.

For its next visit, perhaps the Quartet will attempt the kind of ambitious program it performed at Columbia University in New York on Feb. 10 when the program comprised the Mendelssohn, Beethoven’s Opus 95 and Henri Dutilleux’s “Ainsi la Nuit.”