Daniel Quartet Displays Attention to Detail

Jollity and irrepressibility may be qualities the Netherlands-based Daniel String Quartet are capable of invoking and projecting, but one couldn’t have known that from the ensemble’s visit to Beckman Auditorium in Pasadena Sunday, when its program offered a melancholy first half and a stoic post-intermission.

That was the bad news. The good: The Daniel Quartet plays with musical breadth, technical achievement and rare, wondrous detailing of the music at hand. It is a most admirable, accomplished ensemble. This probing performance before the Coleman Chamber Music Assn. was one of the high points of the season so far.

The players--new-this-decade violinist Joan Berkhemer, violinist Misha Furman, violist Itamar Shimon and cellist Zvi Maschkovski--play with virtuosic skills masked by personal understatement. They operate as a unit: Details become uniform, intonation matches, the dovetailing in attack and dynamics seems effortless.

In Schubert’s program-closing Quartet in A minor (“Rosamunde”) the group accomplished the work’s poignancies without grandstanding, its subtleties without preciosity; the musical line flowed and the balances proved perfect.

In the generous first half, Mozart’s D-minor Quartet, K. 421, and Shostakovich’s full-throated, cogent Seventh, displayed the full range of the ensemble’s emotional and mechanical resources, so that one heard the music, not the performance. In between, Oedeon Partos’ brief Concertino (1934) proved a fast-paced, pessimistic but finally engaging program novelty.