MUSIC REVIEWS : Colorado Quartet Shines With Brahms

The Colorado Quartet presented a spectacularly accomplished performance of Brahms’ long, technically demanding Quartet in B flat, Opus 67, at Schoenberg Hall on the UCLA campus on Sunday.

A whole catalogue of virtues applied to its effort: tight, flawlessly balanced ensemble as well as strong individual presences, centered intonation, a wide yet never contrived-sounding dynamic scale (the group’s ensemble tone has gained heft, without loss of clarity, in recent years), intense concentration and a convincing interpretive plan for a very grand work that can in less sensitive hands fall victim to its own curious alternation of amiability and ferocity.

This was playing with all the sentiment one could desire, but never lapsing into sentimentality. Rhythms were neatly propelled in the first and third movements, and it is difficult to imagine the moonlit song of the slow movement sung with more lyric glow and strength than it was on this occasion by violist Francesca Martin Silos.

Even the finale, which more often than not sounds like an afterthought, cobbled together as a formal necessity, took on significance as a consequence of the energy and fine detailing with which it was projected.

The program also presented the West Coast premiere of the Quartet (1994) by Philadelphia composer Jan Krzywicki.

The 25-minute work, written expressly for the Colorado--whose membership comprises, in addition to Martin Silos, violinists Julie Rosenfeld and Deborah Redding and cellist Diane Chaplin--is a study in motivic repetition and what sounded (on first hearing) like a heavy load of East-European anguish, with too much sul ponticello keening, too many spooky glissandos and slashing sforzandos: a collection of devices. If its purpose was to give the players a workout, it succeeded.

Until the rushed (by Rosenfeld), somewhat scrambled finale, the program-opener, Beethoven’s Quartet in D, Opus 18, No. 3, proved a delight in the hands of the Coloradans (who are, by the way, based in New York): rhythmically alert, bright-toned and good-natured, but not to the exclusion of the score’s inherently edgy humor.