Urgent Readings by Mendelssohn Strings

The program strayed no further than Haydn, Mendelssohn and Beethoven. But the Mendelssohn String Quartet made it seem vital and new and trenchant Friday at Doheny Mansion, in a Chamber Music in Historic Sites concert.

First of all, the program turned out to have a theme: decline and death. It presented Haydn’s last work, the Opus 103 fragment, which the composer took years to write and inscribed, “All my strength is gone, I am old and weak”; Mendelssohn’s late Quartet, Opus 80, an agitated and sad requiem for his sister, Fanny; and Beethoven’s Opus 132, a strangely interior yet universe-discovering missive from the aging and deaf master.

Secondly, the Mendelssohnians--Nick Eanet, Nicholas Mann, Maria Lambros and Marcy Rosen--played it with fierce physicality and emotional abandon, intelligent insight and supreme technique. One felt wrung out at the end of this concert. So did, it appeared, the quartet, which offered no encore despite vigorous applause.

The group is a wonderful balancing act. Made up of players of solo caliber and personality, they nevertheless close the circle, remaining in animated and taut conversation among themselves. Consistently heated and dramatic in this discourse, they temper it with a view of the overall picture and never exaggerate the moment. Even in the small confines of Doheny, they were never overbearing.

Beethoven’s quartet emerged rapt and directed, its contrasts scaled to underline meaning rather than call attention to the group’s prowess. To the third movement, the players applied differing degrees of vibrato, outlining its sections in different colors--the Lydian hymn, vibrato-less, sounding holy and medieval.

Haydn’s piece has rarely seemed as warm and inspired. And prefaced by Mann with the sad details that led to its composition, Mendelssohn’s work sounded as immediate as a diary.

* Clarinetist Charles Neidich joins the Mendelssohn Quartet in music by Weber, Brahms and Rose Tuesday at Irvine Barclay Theater, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine, (714) 854-4646, 8 p.m. $14-$25.