MUSIC REVIEW : American String Quartet Plays With Dramatic Fervor

For its third Los Angeles-area appearance in less than a year--you can’t get too much of a great thing--the American String Quartet brought a nourishing, heavyweight program to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library on Sunday afternoon.

There were problems at the outset, although not those of intonation and balance, which bedevil lesser ensembles. Rather, the G-major Quartet from Haydn’s Op. 76 was uncomfortably loud and pushy, clearly the result of underestimating the venue’s lively acoustic.

It was also, however, a charmless reading. The players--violinists Peter Winograd and Laurie Carney, violist Daniel Avshalomov, cellist David Geber--delivered the big gestures tellingly. The smaller Haydnesque ones went by the boards, notably the insinuating trio of the scherzo, which was delivered with martial aggressiveness.

In the First Quartet of Janacek, the “Kreutzer Sonata,” the volume level was even higher, given the composer’s sonorous demands. Still, the performance was one of such dramatic fervor and technical command that the listener had to capitulate.

To conclude, the players engaged the vast Beethoven Quartet in B flat, Op. 130, with its original “Great Fugue” finale. The ensemble obviously had got the point about the acoustics by this time, and the sound they produced was one of perfectly tempered solidity. They also plumbed the depths of this score, calling attention not to its exigencies but to the flow of melody, the rise and fall of Beethoven’s varied patterns of sound and structure, allowing every strand of the capstone fugue to emerge with clarity.