Vermeer Pulls In Emotional Reins

If you’ve been playing as a group for 30 years, the chances are pretty good that you will develop a unified sound, which the Vermeer String Quartet certainly has done. It is a polished, homogenous, nearly seamless blend that is also a little bland, or at least that’s how it sounded in the wide spaces of the Los Angeles County Art Museum’s Bing Theatre Wednesday night.

Alas, the blandness filtered its way into some of the interpretations, even in works that ought to provoke a more intense response. Though Beethoven’s String Quartet in F, Opus 135, may seem deceptively lightweight next to its probing, experimental companions among the late quartets, it also has its passages of depth and eccentricity. Yet the Vermeer, which has recorded all of the Beethoven quartets for Teldec, treated it like a lightweight piece, with little drive, toughness or meditative concentration; even the Scherzo’s berserk, totally off-the-wall central dance sounded tame.

The torpor extended into the first three movements of Berg’s “Lyric Suite,” the 12-tone, emotional chronicle of an illicit love affair whose elaborately interconnected references have titillated program annotators ever since George Perle cracked its code back in 1977.

Yet some of the missing intensity started to develop in the fourth movement--although the climax, with its agonized sounding of the motif representing Berg’s lover, could have been more cathartic--and the fifth movement had plenty of snap and incisiveness.

The Vermeer’s refined, unruffled sonic profile found its most comfortable vehicle in the Mendelssohn Quartet in D, Opus 44, No. 1, producing adequate drive and even some muscle in the first movement; serene, flowing, emotionally detached performances of the inner movements; and an unhurried finale. It was perfectly acceptable chamber music making, but nothing that will remain with you for long.