MUSIC REVIEW : Muir Quartet Impresses, Disappoints

It was so quiet you could hear a string quartet play.

Unusually benign conditions greeted the Muir String Quartet in Cahuenga Pass Monday night, as the young veteran ensemble offered a mainstream program at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre.

Even the freeway noise seemed distant on this occasion (wind conditions?), so that one felt closer to the sound and anatomy of the performances than is usual here. The Muir, too, contributed to this involved feeling by projecting carefully finished, active and pointed readings of quartets by Dvorak, Bartok and Schubert.

Founded in 1980, the Muir--violinists Peter Zazofsky and Bayla Keyes (they trade off on first), violist Steven Ansell, cellist Michael Reynolds--has developed a distinct sound and performance style, which on this occasion worked both for and against it. In short, the group plays with an unusual regard for tautness of rhythm and phrase. Its interpretations are as tightly wound as an alarm clock and go off just as predictably.

In addition, these musicians impart a certain slickness to their playing by emphasizing the beginnings of notes--not with hard articulation but with speedy bows--and then quickly tapering off. Everything becomes pert, focused, bouncy, flexed. There is nothing casual about their playing.

This, of course, has its distinct merits and pleasures. It could also be distracting, tiresome even, and proved not equally suited to all of the music.

On Monday, the least familiar work, Bartok’s challenging Second String Quartet, fared best. In its vigorously polished reading, the Muir gave the music’s austere intertwinings a wonderfully sinewy quality, projected its raw energies with lean ferocity, and uncovered the slow danger beneath the surface of the Lento finale.

Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet benefited from the ensemble’s unremitting intensity and rhythmic drive, and suffered from its unwillingness to allow a lyrical line to soar off on its own without interpretive imprints holding it down.

This taut approach made parts of the finale of Dvorak’s “American” Quartet sound curiously like a beguine (as in “Begin the . . . “), but overall it was a richly textured, neatly executed and intelligently arched reading.