From the Lyrical to the Zestful With the Guarneri String Quartet

There was a prevailing moodiness to the Guarneri String Quartet’s Coleman Chamber Concerts program, Sunday afternoon at Beckman Auditorium. It began and ended in smiles, but even Mozart seemed vulnerable to the graying influence of the rain and Kodaly’s Quartet in D, Opus 10.

Composed during the final years of World War I, Kodaly’s second and last quartet is an imaginative structure filled in with oppressive noodling. There were flares of Hungarian fire in the last movement, but deployed more as boundary signs than as light or heat.

The composer marked that movement “Allegro giocoso,” but the Guarneri found little there that was jocose. Violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree and cellist David Soyer brought a full measure of their familiar elegance and warmth to the work, but a slight emphasis on the transference of fitful solo passages was the only indication of why this relative rarity might be important to them.

They raised the intensity level substantially after intermission for Schumann’s A-minor Quartet, Opus 41, No. 1. No question, either, about the focus of their interest here, on the poignant instrumental balladry of the Adagio. They sang with poised nobility and then tore into the finale with great zest and rhythmic acuity.

The Guarneris opened with a rather subdued account of Mozart’s Quartet in G, K. 387. First of the six so-called “Haydn” quartets, this is usually a piece of bright ebullience and humor, but the Guarneri played it for understatement and mellow lyricism instead, with an uncommonly relaxed Menuetto.

In encore the ensemble turned to the rondo finale of Mozart’s K. 159 and caught perfectly its playful, convention-goosing gamesmanship and bravura stylistic cruising.