Music And Dance Reviews : Academy Sextet Displays Aggressive Style

The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Sextet, heard in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel Thursday night, proved not to be the polite and polished ensemble of expectations. Polished it was, most of the time; polite, never.

Appearing in a Chamber Music in Historic Sites concert, the London-based sextet, an offshoot of the famed orchestra, turned out to be a rather overbearing group.

In the bright and lively acoustic of the Blossom Room--the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its first “Merit Awards” dinner there in 1929--this string ensemble went for the jugular in everything it played and asked stylistic questions later.

This produced OK results in Brahms’ Sextet, Opus 18. But in Mozart’s Quintet, K. 515, it was a case of taking heartiness to extremes. With wide vibrato, swooping phrases and forceful sonorities, these players--headed by violinist Kenneth Sillito--swept Classical niceties aside and, wringing maximum expressiveness from the music, overstated the composer’s poised invention. It would be difficult to imagine the Academy Sextet playing this piece any differently had the name on the score been Schumann.

In Brahms, of course, this kind of fervency works better, and, coupled with the group’s rich blend and honed ensemble, it produced a performance that would probably satisfy many Brahmsians. Still, to some this kind of con gusto playing sounds both lazy and tedious, sacrificing clear thinking and musical detail to emotional ripeness from first note to last.

The two movements of the otherwise lost Sextet of the young Borodin, described by the composer as “very Mendelssohnian” (rather hopefully as it turns out), opened the concert in a pleasant and inconsequential fashion.