Starry Night From Orion No Accident

It is easy to forget the reliable excellence of the programs brought to us by the Laguna Chamber Music Society--founded in 1959--and since 1991 co-sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.

Then comes a concert such as the one Monday by the Orion String Quartet with guest violist Ida Kavafian at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, and the realization hits home anew. The three-part program of music by Dvorak, Smetana and Barber was consistently splendid.

During its 11-year existence, the Orion, the resident quartet of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, has learned the difficult art of knowing when to sing with one voice and when to let the musicians emerge as individuals.

It may help that the violinists who alternate in the first chair for different works are brothers: Daniel and Todd Phillips. But that could just as easily work against the group. Brothers don’t always share the same temperament.

These apparently do, however, and they have found congenial partners in violist Steven Tenenbom and cellist Timothy Eddy.

When a fifth person joins a quartet, as Kavafian did for Dvorak’s Viola Quintet in E-flat after intermission, the balance can become precarious, even if the guest is married to one of the members, as Kavafian is to Tenenbom.

In this instance it didn’t, even though there were a thousand chances to fail, for attack and phrasing to differ, for interpretive nuances to conflict.

The group’s playing and the interpretation of this panoramic, epic work, composed during Dvorak’s visit to the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa, in 1893 was consistently beguiling and technically nearly impeccable.

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Smetana’s autobiographical Quartet in E minor, “From My Life,” is a work we cannot hear too often precisely because it is so painful to bear. It chronicles the making of the artist and his shock at the onset of deafness at the peak of his powers. (Even so, he would go on to write such a great work as “Ma Vlast” [My Fatherland] after he went deaf.)

The Orion musicians evoked the tragedy present even at the initial youthful struggle to become an artist, the composer’s early naive and roughhewn incorporation of popular dance rhythms, his tender discovery of love with his wife and the mature transformation into pure gold of the musical traditions of his homeland--suddenly cut short by that horrible high E that signaled the start of his malady.

The musicians might have played here and there with a little more sweetness and expansiveness, or a little less ongoing youthful drive. Then again, if they had, they might have sacrificed their unanimity.

Barber’s Quartet in B minor, Opus 11, which opened the program, is less well-known as a whole than for the popular Adagio for Strings drawn from it. The musicians proved there is no substitute for the original version when it is played as sensitively as it was here.

The slow movement of Mozart’s Quintet in C minor, K. 406/516b, was the evening’s sole encore.