Music Review : A Mixed Bach Fest Program From Armadillo Quartet

The locally based Armadillo String Quartet might be a more prominent name on our chamber music scene were not its members busy with dozens of other musical endeavors.

As it is, this talented ensemble--Barry Socher and Steven Scharf, violins, Raymond Tischer, viola, and Armen Ksajikian, cello--showed considerable strengths in the second program of the Los Angeles Bach Festival, now in its 61st year.

But a string quartet playing in a Bach festival will always be a problematical proposition, since, of course, in Bach’s day there was no such thing as a string quartet as we know it.

Undaunted, the Armadillo put together a virtually experimental program listing Bach at both ends, for this concert in the Shatto Chapel of First Congregational Church, Sunday.

At its center was Kurt Weill’s rare String Quartet, Opus 8, written when the composer was a mere 23 and still a student of Busoni. It seems a deliberately wayward piece, drifting through numerous cosmopolitan avenues as if trying to get someone off its tail.

While its semi-tonal thoughts and busy textures are always engaging and well-wrought, one wants to knock this piece on the head and ask what’s going on. The Armadillo, nevertheless, gave it a smoothly accomplished reading.

Selections from “The Art of Fugue,” for which Bach left no specific instrumentation, concluded the event. But, given that the various lines didn’t consistently speak separately on this occasion, and that the string quartet, to the modern ear, is the most conversational of idioms, and the fugue, arguably the least, this instrumentation didn’t quite work here. The music sounded mechanical, despite conscientious, fine-tuned accounts.

Socher’s straightforward arrangement of a Bach prelude and fugue and a pleasantly lived-in performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet, Opus 18, No. 5, completed an interesting evening.