MUSIC REVIEW : Maggini Quartet Offers a Revisionist View of Haydn

It’s been a rough couple of days for Joseph Haydn. On Sunday, at the Clark Library, the otherwise superb American String Quartet steamrollered one of the late quartets. On Monday, in its Music Guild-sponsored concert at Pierce College, the Maggini Quartet anesthetized his last completed work in the form, Quartet in F, Opus 77, No. 2.

In terms of interpretation, this was the way we used to hear Haydn, when the “Papa” moniker was still in use: small in scale, passions muted. The London-based group’s revisionist view might have been tolerable if the intonation of violinists Laurence Jackson and David Angel had been more precise; and while violist Martin Outram and cellist Michal Kaznowski were innocent of that transgression, their participation in some loose ensemble couldn’t be overlooked.

The novelty of the evening was the Fourth String Quartet (1951) by Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969), a rather wan exercise in friendly, folksy neoclassicism, whose raison d’e^tre wasn’t manifest on this occasion.

Ensemble virtues were most apparent in the Dvorak Quintet in A, Opus 81, which also exhibited the strong leadership missing to that point. It came not from the first violinist, but from the young pianist Mari Kodama.

Kodama’s characterful, passionate and technically secure playing ended the concert with a measure of tension and grandeur. It also inspired the most cohesive string playing of the evening.

* The Maggini Quartet plays the same program tonight at the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre, 4401 W. 8th St., 8 p.m. $7-$22. (213) 466-1767.