Petersen Quartet: A Fearless Debut

The high-intensity buzz from Europe over the Petersen Quartet, an ensemble of thirtysomethings with its roots in the much-vaunted Hanns Eisler Music School in the former East Berlin, is eminently justified. At least that was the impression taken away from the group’s local debut Friday at the Doheny Mansion for the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College.

Violinists Conrad Muck and Gernot Sussmuth and cellist Hans-Jakob Eschenburg are traveling with Felix Schwartz on this tour, illness keeping their regular violist, Friedemann Weigle, at home. The substitution did not lower ensemble values, however, and it did inspire a welcome program change, Beethoven’s Opus 132, in A minor, replacing Schubert’s overworked “Death and the Maiden” quartet.

Fearless, scrupulous attention to Beethoven’s severe contrasts in articulation and dynamics and a sense of rhythm as a living rather than mechanical impulse brought the piece to life with revelatory freshness and urgency. This was risky playing, not as gaudy exhibitionism but as starkly honest and unfettered expression, and its rich rewards will linger long.

The centerpiece of the program was Erwin Schulhoff’s 1924 Quartet No. 1, which is an often showy piece but one with very dark undercurrents, even without reading back into it the tragedy of Schulhoff’s later death as a Holocaust victim. It is full of Bartokian instrumental devices, and the Petersens reveled in the coloristic opportunities.

The visitors also took rare advantage of the Doheny’s circular arrangement to sit in an inward-facing circle themselves and change position for each piece. In encore they revisited the early Haydn--Opus 1, No. 3--with which they had begun the evening. After the Beethoven and with the ensemble rotated 180 degrees, the music had an entirely different character and sound, as what had been prologue now became benediction.