MUSIC REVIEWS : Shostakovich String Quartet in a Lackluster Performance

The most rewarding moments in an otherwise lackluster performance by the touring Shostakovich String Quartet, Sunday afternoon in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech, was the group’s first encore, Tchaikovsky’s famous Andante Cantabile.

Most of the passion, lyricism, concentration and detailing the players had merely indicated in the preceding program of works by Glinka, Mozart and Shostakovich came to life in this excerpt.

Here was a performance that emerged touching, urgent and, not incidentally, perfectly gauged in terms of dynamics. Many in the loyal Coleman audience then left the hall, temporarily fulfilled.

For those who stayed, there was another encore, in a reportedly spirited reading of Bartok’s familiar Romanian Dances.

Before that, the thrills were fewer. The afternoon proper ended with an admirable performance of Shostakovich’s moody Eighth Quartet, given its due in the contrasts between surprising violence and brooding pessimism, expectant songfulness and harsh aggression. As was reported at the ensemble’s local debut, three years ago, this quartet lives up to its reputation as a specialist in its namesake’s challenging oeuvre.

The first half of the event found the four players from Moscow--violinists Andrei Shislove and Sergei Pishchugin, violist Alexander Galkovsky and cellist Alexander Korchagin--who have been together in this configuration for 16 of the group’s 26-year history, less interested and less energetic, if fully professional.

Mozart’s wondrous Quartet in B-flat, K. 589, was accorded a run-through usually careful in execution--some intonational lapses notwithstanding--but one pedestrian in energy and sometimes slipping into disinterest. The work described so pointedly in Howard Posner’s bright program notes did not really materialize here.

At the beginning, mediocrity reigned, as the quartet started the proceedings with as unworthy a piece as one can remember being played on this series: Glinka’s third-rate Quartet No. 2. To justify the inclusion of this lame duck on an otherwise respectable program by calling it a novelty would be delusion on a grand scale.