Mendelssohn Quartet Finds Strength in Subtle Intensity

The New York-based Mendelssohn String Quartet opened the Music Guild’s 52nd season Monday with a well-crafted program at Pierce College. The quartet--violinists Nick Eanet and Nicholas Mann, violist Maria Lambros and cellist Marcy Rosen--continue to impress with relatively restrained but by no means uninvolving interpretations.

The foursome brought us a subtly underplayed view of the Quartet in F from Beethoven’s Opus 18, which evoked the surprised reactions of 19th century hearers to music whose well-behaved classical exterior is subjected to all sorts of rudely passionate intrusions as it progresses.

The performers applied more intensity and vibrato to Janacek’s First Quartet, titled “Kreutzer Sonata” after the Tolstoy tale of lethal jealousy that inspired it. Yet even here overt rhetoric was not emphasized. To the score’s unsettling alternations of jagged rhythmic fragments and aching lyricism the Mendelssohns brought a wide range of soft dynamics, enabling them to suggest great volume without actually digging into the strings too vehemently. The drama was effectively projected, but without undue coarsening of ensemble tone.

The Mendelssohns are hardly the first big-time quartet to find the formal logic of Beethoven’s Opus 130, which concluded the program, elusive. On this occasion, the problems were restricted to the opening movement, which emerged as too patchy--lots of trees, only fleeting glimpses of the forest--with slight but upsetting intonational lapses encountered by first violinist Eanet.

It was smooth sailing thereafter, but never too smooth to obscure Beethoven’s dramatic messages. The sublime Cavatina movement was notably moving in this rapt, immaculately balanced reading, while the finale (the lightweight alternative to the original fugal ending) romped with jovial abandon.

* The Mendelssohn Quartet repeats this program tonight at the Wilshire-Ebell Theater, 4401 W. 8th St. 8 p.m. $7-$24. (310) 275-9040.