MUSIC REVIEW : String Quartet Performs With Elegance

The Mendelssohn String Quartet that arrived for a Music Guild-sponsored concert at Pierce College on Monday sported only a single holdover from the original group of a couple of decades ago--cellist Marcy Rosen, one of the intimate art’s abiding treasures. And, if memory serves, the group also brought a more elegant ensemble personality than the one recalled from earlier days.

With Rosen as materfamilias of a young brood comprising violinists Nick Eanet and Nicholas Mann and violist Maria Lambros, the “new” Mendelssohn filled the evening with smart, accomplished, profoundly satisfying music-making.

Its program began with an airborne reading of the Haydn Quartet in D, Opus 20, No. 4, a contrapuntal marvel that can bring out the worst in ensembles whose interpretive stance is overly reliant on dramatic intensity.

These artists built their comprehensive, by no means bloodless, view on a foundation of compact, balanced ensemble, super-reliable intonation and expressively employed vibrato.

To the lately ubiquitous Second Quartet of Janacek, they brought not the usual sawing, hair-tearing and breast-beating but a lightness of tone, touch and, occasionally, of mood that proved refreshing without masking the score’s inherent passion. A definite plus was the contrast between Eanet’s silken first violin and Mann’s edgier second.

All that could be done for the faded glories of Tchaikovsky’s Quartet in D these players did, but there was more substance in the encore: a deft, rhythmically alert projection of the scherzo from namesake Felix Mendelssohn’s Quartet in E flat, Opus 44, No. 3.

* The Mendelssohn String Quartet repeats the program tonight at 8, Wilshire-Ebell Theatre, 4401 W. 8th St., $7-$22. (213) 939-1128.