Guarneri Quartet Maintains Mastery

The rewards of experience and constancy were hearteningly in evidence on Sunday when the Guarneri String Quartet, 33 years in existence without a change in personnel, returned to Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium for the latest of their many appearances on the Coleman Chamber Concerts series.

It was above all in Bartok’s First Quartet, a half-hour long conflict between swooning Romanticism and crabbed Modernism, that the Guarneri--violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree, cellist David Soyer--showed their fabulous stuff. A pervasive lyricism and suave ensemble tone, three parts warmly burnished, with Soyer’s slightly edgy cello as the contrasting fourth, continues to distinguish the Guarneri sound and stance from that of other top-rank, more dramatically inclined American quartets. And it proved as wonderfully apt in this particular Bartok as in the core Romantic fare for which the Guarneri is most admired.

It was an interpretation where the lyric arches were separated by outbursts of rhythmic aggressiveness in which beauty of tone was not sacrificed for dramatic effect. The contradictions of the score were fully, gloriously revealed.

The other big work on a program that opened with one of the teenage Mozart’s lesser inspirations, the Quartet in F, K. 168, was an old Guarneri standby, the Brahms Quartet in A minor. And if the players’ energy level and concentration (including patches of suspect intonation from Steinhardt and Soyer) faltered in the opening movement, the silken sound and elegance of phrasing in the andante exemplified prime, timeless Guarneri.