MUSIC REVIEWS : Guildhall Strings Lack Energy

Perhaps it was the excessively unvaried program, but the widely acclaimed and much-recorded Guildhall String Ensemble’s concert Friday night at El Camino College never caught fire with the small Marsee Auditorium audience.

Playing almost exclusively dour Romantic music by Mozart, Elgar, Grieg, Barber and Tchaikovsky, the 11-person ensemble played with unanimous lack of energy, lack of nuance, and lack of involving dynamic gradation, nor were matters helped by occasionally indifferent intonation, particularly in the violas. Although presumably under the leadership of director and first violinist Robert Salter, the players also became a visual distraction by spending an inordinate amount of time looking around at each other as if they were auditioning for the opening credits of television’s old Brady Bunch.

After opening with Felix Mendelssohn’s eager Sinfonia No. 10, the first half continued with broadly slow and boring performances of Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue K. 546, Sir Edward Elgar’s little Elegy Opus 58 and Edvard Grieg’s “Holberg Suite,” the latter painfully lacking the grace and smiles that have made it such a favorite.

After intermission, Samuel Barber’s familiar “Adagio for Strings” received a refined but disinterested interpretation, followed by a performance of Tchaikovsky’s C Major Serenade Opus 48 that seemed to go on forever with hints of charm and distinction only surfacing in the waltz movement. Not surprisingly, the Ensemble did not offer the weakly applauding audience an encore.