MUSIC REVIEWS : Ysaye Quartet Delivers Satisfying Concert

Ensemble-playing of such quiet power and succinct rhetoric as that displayed by the touring Ysaye Quartet, Sunday on the Coleman Concerts series, is rare and cherishable. Among other virtues, what one admired at this satisfying afternoon performance was its ease and lack of self-consciousness.

In today’s super-competitive musical environment, it must be difficult to insist on the minimal grandstanding displayed here by the Paris-based Ysaye players--violinists Christophe Giovaninetti and Luc-Marie Aguera, violist Miguel da Silva and cellist Michel Poulet. Still, understatement, poise, a slender tone and complete instrumental integration characterize everything the ensemble plays.

In Beckman Auditorium at Caltech, high seriousness marked Mozart’s “Dissonance” Quartet, K. 465, given a pristine yet emotionally comprehensive reading. Erwin Schulhoff’s First Quartet (1924) showed another set of colors and feelings, plus good humor; the piece, written in a non-hostile atonal style, is brief, pithy, substantial, witty--a gem.

The core of Mendelssohn’s Quartet in D, Opus 44, No. 1, lies in the subtleties of its central movements, which these players drew out and projected. The outside movements, dealing in bravado, made their points with contrasting directness and virtuosity to spare.

* Repeating the Mozart and Schulhoff works, and with pianist Ayke Agus in Franck’s Piano Quintet, the Ysaye Quartet plays admission-free for Fullerton Friends of Music, Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at Sunny Hills High School, (714) 525-5836. With Agus again in the Franck Quintet, a different Mozart work and the Ravel Quartet, the ensemble plays for Music Guild, Monday at Cal State Long Beach, April 11 at Pierce College in Woodland Hills and April 12 at the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre, 4401 W. 8th St., all at 8 p.m., $5-$22. (310) 275-9040.