Russian Violist Bashmet Joins Quintet for Articulate Concert

Celebrity and the viola seldom go together, but the instrument does attract uncommonly reflective and expressive musicians such as Yuri Bashmet, who is as close to a superstar as the viola has had in a long time. The Russian violist joined a contingent of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s brightest and best Monday in a pleasantly varied, stunningly played program of chamber music at the Colburn School’s Zipper Concert Hall.

Brahms himself suggested substituting the viola for the clarinet in his B-minor Quintet, Opus 115, and Bashmet has further adapted and recorded the work for solo viola with small string orchestra. Monday he returned to the quintet format in the high-powered company of violinists Martin Chalifour and Lyndon Johnston Taylor, violist Evan Wilson and cellist Ronald Leonard.

Bashmet’s tone is almost vocally articulate and deceptively light. He easily occupied the foreground in a big and richly projected reading, one that was spacious in thought, focused in gesture and much drawn to the dark side of this brooding work that is as anxious as it is autumnal.

Bashmet and Wilson opened the proceedings with a duo by Jean-Marie Leclair, transferred from violins to violas. They traced its high Baroque course neatly and suavely enough, though cautiously astylistic.

Between the viola features came music for wind quintet. Flutist Anne Diener Zenter, oboist Marion Arthur Kuszyk, clarinetist David Howard, bassoonist David Breidenthal and horn player Jerry Folsom breathed remarkably elegant life into Franz Danzi’s B-flat Quintet, Opus 56, No. 1, a pretty but faded relic of the early 19th century Parisian passion for the genre.

The same team then turned in a splendidly pointed account of Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles, warmly supported by the lush Zipper acoustic. These mercurial pieces are most often mined for their abundant motor energies and spunky rhythms, but the Philharmonic five also paid rewarding attention to Ligeti’s deftly balanced harmonic coloring and urgent emotional subtexts.