MUSIC REVIEW : Angeles Quartet Takes On a Challenge

It is easy to forget just how much of what is essential about music, especially certain pieces, lies not in the printed score.

One was reminded of it when the Angeles Quartet, with guests, took on a hugely challenging program Tuesday night in Bridges Hall at Pomona College, Claremont.

Reminded of it really because of the ensemble’s impressively polished accounts of Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht” string sextet and of Schubert’s String Quintet in C, D. 956. Reminded of it because, despite the polish, despite the players’ attentiveness to the printed page, there was something missing from these performances.

Now in its fifth year, the Angeles Quartet--violinists Kathleen Lenski and Roger Wilkie, violist Brian Dembow and cellist Stephen Erdody--essayed Schoenberg’s hyper-Romantic sextet with the aid of violist Michael Nowak and cellist Ronald Leonard. This ensemble offered a dynamically faceted, rhythmically firm and sensitively colored account of the score. There was even a consistent intensity in this performance.

There was also a carefulness about it. In rendering the printed notes so faithfully the ensemble missed the bigger picture, the work’s narrative landscape, its emotional abandonment, its fragrances--in short, its fervent poetry.

The first two movements of Schubert’s Quintet (played by the Angeles with Leonard) also exist in the realms of poetry. In great performances of the Adagio, especially, time is halted, but even in such a mundane-seeming detail as the little march tune that pops up in the first movement, there is something ineffable. Here, again, the ensemble’s performance proved more admirable than compelling.

In the following Scherzo and Allegretto, however, the players’ wonderful athleticism came to the fore, in vigorous, risk-taking readings. The lyrical playing too (as a result?), seemed to take on added luster.