Vermeer Quartet Offers Varied Concert

Variety may be the spice of life but it can be counterproductive as a programmatic theme. The Vermeer Quartet demonstrated that Sunday afternoon at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium, with a Coleman Chamber Concerts program so heterogeneous as to dissolve into three discrete performances connected only by place and personnel.

Three exquisitely played performances, one hastens to add, and well-considered in particulars no matter how baffling taken as a whole. Violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi and Mathias Tacke, violist Richard Young and cellist Marc Johnson applied a consistently focused ensemble sound and interpretive eloquence to some Schubert juvenilia, Shostakovich’s tormented C-minor Quartet and Dvorak’s glorious Piano Quintet.

In the latter, they were handsomely abetted by pianist Anne-Marie McDermott. She added a distinctively zesty personality to the mellower ministrations of her string colleagues, sparking an extraordinarily supple, rhythmically rooted account of the popular masterpiece.

There are Schubert quartets that would make a compelling follow to the Dvorak Quintet, but the E-flat effort of the 16-year-old composer, D. 87, is far too insubstantial for the role. Its charms are entirely preliminary, as it were, suggestive but incomplete. Only in the buoyant finale did the Vermeers find something characterful to dig into.

There are also Schubert quartets--the late A-minor, perhaps--that would make a telling preamble to Shostakovich’s memorial to “the victims of fascism and war,” but the polite formulas of the programmed Schubert and the bourgeois Vienna they represent were blown away long before Shostakovich wrote his Opus 110 in 1960.

Context aside, the Vermeers delivered a powerful reading of the work. Arguably too suave and controlled for some of the more brutal or forlorn passages, it nonetheless accumulated intensity through detail and nuance, and earned its quietly radiant benediction.