Quartet Loses Name, Keeps Its Spirit

Among the many virtues of the ever-felicitous Chamber Music in Historic Sites is its canny roster mix of distinguished veterans and emerging ensembles. Sunday afternoon at the Harvey Aluminum House high in the Hollywood Hills, the series presented the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award-winning Magellan String Quartet in its local debut.

This was also its farewell performance, in a sense. Another group has laid claim to the Magellan name, and so the Juilliard-trained ensemble is now the Whitman Quartet. The choice of an intrepid navigator and then a muscular poet as namesakes indicates something of the dynamic and adventuresome spirit that violinists Michael Shih and Patricia Sunwoo, violist Ori Kam and cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper bring to their work.

Those qualities were most overt in Tan Dun’s “Eight Colors.” Over the engrossing course of these East-meets-West miniatures, the Chinese American composer fuses stereotypical gestures of Peking opera and 1960s-era post-serialism into an eccentric, personal idiom. Culture and style, he affirms, are now a matter of choice as much as of inheritance.

Discovery and poetry were also key elements of the ensemble’s exhilarating traversal of Ravel’s youthful Quartet in F. They illumined the popular score with dark but vibrant color, an intense inner glow carefully focused by fearlessly articulated rhythm and pertinent melodic inflection.

Schubert’s Quartet Movement in C minor is much loved in some quarters--mostly first violinists, cynics among us suspect. The inequitably distributed material is undeniably charming and passionate, and Shih drove it along with urgent flair and a bit more portamento slither than was really helpful.