Southwest String Quartet Gets Off to a Shaky Start

The Southwest Chamber Music Society kicked off its third season of summer concerts Saturday night at the Huntington Art Gallery with a bracing agenda of some rarely heard and long-loved fare.

Yet, with half of the established Southwest String Quartet missing, one could only wonder if group dynamics prevented the performers from meeting the challenges at hand; second violinist Susan Jensen was out with tendinitis, and scheduling conflicts kept cellist Leighton Fong from participating. During solos, their substitutes--German violinist Agnes Gottschewski, a recent recruit to the Pacific and Long Beach symphonies, and cellist Richard Naill, who has collaborated with the quartet in the past--brought solidity and consideration to their work. Yet the group as a whole seemed unable to find clear moods and substance in the scores.

With violinist Peter Marsh at the helm and violist Jan Karlin contributing dark solos, the ensemble offered a sober performance of Ravel’s familiar Quartet in F, rhythmically purposeful but thin-toned when it demanded lushness, acerbic when it might have engaged sensually and pale where it might have explored shifting colors.

Given the pallid reading of the well-known, one is tempted to reserve judgment of Donald Crockett’s “Array for String Quartet,” which was written in 1987 for the Kronos Quartet but has remained unrecorded and relatively untapped.

In the hands of these instrumentalists, the 17-minute piece seemed an intellectual exercise on how to expand limited materials and a dreary conversation of interrupted motives, unified by rhythm patterns and couched in Bartok-type harmonies. Only in the fourth of Crockett’s five connected sections, when the parts coalesce into homophonic contemplation, did the results surpass pedestrianism.

The folksy melodies, set among mournful ostinatos, and the driving rhythms of Silvestre Revueltas’ brief String Quartet No. 4, “Musica de Feria,” fared best. Here, the group disclosed both poignancy and energetic insistence, despite raucous competition by feuding crows near the loggia.