Quartetto Gelato Offers Light Pleasures

Light programming, like comedy, is serious business. Only gifted and astute artists need attempt the risk-filled interpretive landscape where “Danny Boy,” Monti’s “Czardas” or “Core’ngrato” reside. Such repertory may have become purely pops by now, but performing it well takes genuine talent and accomplishment.

Quartetto Gelato has the stuff, as the four Toronto-based musicians showed a large and enthusiastic audience in Schoenberg Hall Auditorium at UCLA Saturday night. Dry humor and occasional clowning around are part of the quartet’s arsenal, yet first it meets the requisite virtues of skilled music-making. And its pleasure-giving is consistent.

Oboist/English hornist Cynthia Stiljes, tenor/violinist Peter de Sotto, violist/accordionist/arranger Claudio Vena and cellist/guitarist George Meanwell perform entirely from memory, and their freedom from score-watching unsurprisingly makes them doubly effective; eye contact within the ensemble does not hurt thoroughness, either.

There are no hidden meanings behind the group’s name, which seems simply to indicate the delectability of what it offers: faceted stylishness. Formally, the best playing emerged in the only straight-ahead performance of the evening, that of J.C. Bach’s two-movement Oboe Quartet in B-flat. Emotionally, the strongest moment came in the evening’s crowning encore, “O Sole Mio.”

In between, one had to admire Vena’s clever re-scoring of excerpts from Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana”; Stiljes’ unperturbed virtuosity in a 19th-century concerto on themes from “La Favorita”; De Sotto’s fleet-fingered violin-playing in “Czardas” or his touching singing of the “Cavalleria” Siciliana.

Two duets, both halfheartedly and clunkily performed, a Handel transcription for violin and cello and Ravel’s “Piece en Forme de Habanera,” filled out the program. Incidentally, there is no tilde in Habanera, no matter what they say on the street. The name of the dance comes from the name of the town, Habana; the error may be widespread but it is still inexcusable.