Ysaye Quartet: Refined but Detached

Elegance has its limitations. Polish only goes so far.

The Ysaye Quartet demonstrated as much Sunday at Caltech in the second of this year’s Coleman Chamber Concerts. You could admire the French string quartet’s playing as if it were a piece of finely painted china or an exquisitely scented rose, but emotional involvement was more difficult to achieve.

Founded in 1984, the Ysaye Quartet, despite some recent personnel changes, has a tangible, almost tangy surface sheen. Everything is just so--the way the first violin sits delicately poised atop the sound pyramid, the way the players thread phrases carefully and pithily, the way they refuse to dig in with their bows, producing a smooth, unforced sound that rarely rises above mezzo forte.

But the Ysaye’s performance style dictates the way the music goes, rather than vice versa. In Sunday’s Austro-German program, the playing seemed reserved and fastidious.

Haydn’s humorous and eloquent Quartet, Opus 54, No. 2, was silkenly dispatched with a fine sense of instrumental interplay, though at times it sounded like an elocution lesson.

Anton Webern’s acerbic Quartet, Opus 28, and his phantasmic Six Bagatelles suited the Ysaye’s style best, and emerged appropriately taut and connected over wide leaps. The group’s pianissimo playing showed many shades.

The eminent Hungarian American cellist Janos Starker came aboard after intermission for Schubert’s C-major Quintet. The performance definitely had its moments--detailed, hushed and controlled--but ultimately failed to reach Schubert’s spiritual peaks or warm to his great tunes. Starker proved himself a good ensemble man, but occasionally slipped in a portamento or a crescendo, little hints of a broader expressive palette. But his hints weren’t taken.