MUSIC REVIEWS : Chilingirian Opens Series for Guild in Long Beach

The Music Guild, now in its 49th season, has expanded its chamber music operations to include three locations, with the inaugural venture held Monday night at its chosen site at Cal State Long Beach, the rebuilt Gerald R. Daniel Recital Hall.

Like a chain store, the Guild puts out a reliable product: Some of the best chamber groups in the world visit the Southland under its auspices. Perhaps, too, it’s a predictable product, the repertory consisting almost exclusively of age-old classics. This season’s most contemporary offering is a Shostakovich trio written in the 1940s, and don’t expect the Arditti or the Kronos on this series soon.

Still, those old guys knew how to write chamber music pretty well too, and Monday’s offering of a Haydn/Beethoven/Schubert program by the 22-year-old London-based Chilingirian String Quartet (which was repeated Wednesday at the Wilshire-Ebell) would leave very few complaining.

The Chilingirian--violinists Levon Chilingirian and Charles Sewart, violist Simon Rowland-Jones, cellist Philip de Groote--brought solid, effortless ensemble and a robust approach to the music at hand. Interpretations involved neither trickery, slickness or false emotions--the quartet earned every bit of these expressively faceted performances.

Haydn’s Quartet in G minor, Opus 74, No. 3, emerged wonderfully energetic and driven, not a circumscribed note in it. Without exaggeration, the group captured the fullness of Beethoven’s rhetoric in his “Harp” Quartet, with climaxes (nevertheless) of almost raucous intensity led by the commanding and virtuoso presence of first violinist Levon Chilingirian.

The ensemble’s easy unanimity suffered some in Schubert’s Cello Quintet, D. 956, though apparently not because of the advent of guest cellist Ronald Leonard. It mattered only intermittently, in this aggressive, expansive and consistently engrossing reading.