Quartet’s Depth Shows in Dvorak’s

Dvorak is a poet of evergreen nature, of spirit galloping across vast expanse, of unfailing love for the Czech homeland. But there is a moment in his Quartet in A flat, Opus 105, when he stops abruptly and looks into the grave.

Otherwise suffused with his sunny gratefulness at finally being back in Bohemia after a three-year stay in the United States, the work suddenly marks a realization that he has nowhere new left to go except the abyss, that he has arrived face to face with the common fate of humanity.

And it was this moment that stunned the audience when the Miro String Quartet made its brilliant Orange County debut Thursday in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

How was it possible a young quartet--formed only four years ago at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio--could express such a degree of emotional maturity and depth?

Violinists Daniel Ching and Sandy Yamamoto, violist John Largess and cellist Joshua Gindele had already dazzled us with an electrifying performance of Ginastera’s fiendishly difficult but bewitching (1968) Second Quartet and charmed us with their sheer joy of playing in Mozart’s early Quartet in C, K. 170.

But this--this memento mori in the slow movement--was something else.

I had fatuously remarked to a friend at intermission that I wished the program had been arranged chronologically rather than--as usual--with the contemporary piece embedded before intermission so that the audience wouldn’t decamp. Dvorak could hold his own, of course, but still he would sound somewhat simple-minded at first with his tonic-dominant harmonies and his simple and compound meters.

How wrong I was.

Dvorak wasn’t balm and calm at all. Quite the contrary. Even the reaffirmation of life in his finale couldn’t reverse the lingering sorrow and poignancy of the previous movement. Another major work would have been intolerable.

All this was even more impressive because the Miro quartet had agreed to substitute on short notice for the originally scheduled Borromeo String Quartet, one of whose members had come down with chicken pox.

The Miro players have never before been reviewed in Southern California.

To be sure, they have already earned remarkable honors--first prize at the 50th annual Coleman Chamber Music Competition in 1996 in Pasadena and, within a month of that, both first and grand prizes at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition in South Bend, Ind. Now we have an inkling why.

Like the work of their painter namesake, the Miro quartet embodies an exquisite balance among strong, independent parts.

One of the treats was seeing them interact--violist Largess leaning toward second violinist Yamamoto and cellist Gindele to clarify and keep vivid Ginastera’s punishing complex rhythms, or first violinist Ching spinning out virtuosic roulades.

But this is pulling apart an integrated whole, every one of whose members demonstrate their critical contributions.

They brought youth, care and freshness to Mozart’s early effort, which shows both his unearthly ability to conjure magical melodies out of the air with three or four notes (in the third movement) and also a near-gaucherie perhaps more typical of Haydn that he would quickly outgrow (in the last).

They played Ginastera with blazing gusto, shedding horsehair off their bows at a nearly alarming rate, yet keeping us riveted on the composer’s fierce rhythms and haunting atmospheric tone paintings.

None of this should suggest that there is no room for growth. They could play with more leisure, more warmth, more expansiveness. Their strengths are those of a hot-blooded young quartet. So are their weaknesses. They will get older.

But audience members who gave them a standing ovation had every right to do so. The great heritage of Western art music is secured for a while by a generation such as this.