Budapest Strings Show Polish and Grace

The Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College Chamber Music in Historic Sites series has done it again, somehow matching a site almost perfectly with the music at hand.

On Thursday night, the Budapest Strings found itself making its local debut within a hitherto overlooked acoustical gem of a space, the recently refurbished Grand Ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. It’s a smallish room in the classic shoe-box shape, with plenty of wood surfaces and curlicues and the warm yet clear, bass-rich acoustics were seemingly made-to-order for this extremely accomplished, mostly young, 16-piece string ensemble.

Indeed, in the second half of the concert, it was easy to get the feeling that a pleasantly surprised ensemble was playing to the hall, luxuriating in the sound (although certainly the repertoire encouraged that).

Working without a conductor, the group applies a high level of polish and graceful, cultivated phrasing to everything it touches, and they don’t take anything for granted. After opening with Benedetto Marcello’s Introduzione, Aria e Presto, they demonstrated how to revivify Mozart’s overly familiar Eine Kleine Nachtmusik with subtle fluctuations in dynamic levels and a slight, rarely experienced feeling of dread in the middle of the second movement.

Concertmaster Bela Banfalvi then displayed a seamless, if slightly bland grasp of the solo line in Haydn’s Violin Concerto in G.

Proceeding in rough chronological order, reducing their ranks to 13 players, the Budapest Strings offered a flowing, mobile reading of Rossini’s String Sonata No. 3--perhaps the greatest piece ever written by a 12-year-old. They do English string music very well, too, laying on the emotion in a melting, sweepingly sensuous performance of Elgar’s Serenade for Strings in E Minor (which they have recorded for Capriccio). In the Third Suite from Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, the somewhat dragging tempos in the first and fourth movements were compensated by the lovely, hushed playing in the first and the dense, massive chords in the fourth.

Finally, thankfully, there was something by a Hungarian, Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, as an encore, with the luxurious string tone now allied with rhythmic tartness, deeply felt rubatos and a dashing pace. How about the Divertimento for Strings next time?