The Voice of Vigor From American Strings

Quartets are either young or old. They’re either one voice or four. The American String Quartet, which played music by Mozart, Bartok and Dvorak in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Thursday, is a young quartet, and it’s one voice.

“Young,” in this case, doesn’t mean that the players are young or that the group is newly formed. It’s in attitude and approach. Yet it is generally true, as the great Budapest Quartet violinist Alexander Schneider once remarked about his own life in music, that the blood pulses more quickly in the young. Their playing is faster, brighter, tighter, and so was the American’s.

On the plus side, this can mean a healthy vigor and urgency, as was the case in Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat, K. 614 (with guest violist Brian Dembow of the Angeles String Quartet). High spirits, drive and tight ensemble characterized the playing. No periwigged classicists here, and certainly no intimations of mortality--which are hard to find anyway, even if this is Mozart’s final chamber work. This was a charged dynamo. There wasn’t much warmth or sweetness.

On the negative, all that urgency can mean a lack of light and shade, airiness and emotional expansiveness, as was the case in Dvorak’s Quartet in D minor, Opus 34. There was forward drive, almost a sense of making a diamond under pressure.

Attacks were aggressive, but individual voices were not aggressively pursued. Rather, parts were subordinated to the whole, which of course means that the quartet is one voice, not four. In the slow movement, the result was an emotional reticence that sounded stylistically more French than Slavic.

The ensemble’s approach worked best in Bartok’s intense, thorny and strange Quartet No. 5. Here the hot-blooded single-mindedness admirably served the composer’s compacted rhythms and textures, while allowing for crystalline clarity.

There was no encore.