Bold Moves From St. Petersburg String Quartet

When the Sunday Brunch Classics series began two years back at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, it was a good idea whose time had not quite come. There were bugs to be ironed out, including wrestling with the elements of an outdoor venue--adjusting the sound system for chamber music intimacies, staving off the heat and battling windblown sheets of music.

When this year’s series kicked off Sunday morning, all the elements seemed in place. A giant green canopy shielded concert-goers from the midday sun, and even the airplane intrusions were most well-timed. Most important, the music makers on hand, the St. Petersburg String Quartet, currently the quartet-in-residence at Oberlin College in Ohio, produced a bold, luxuriant sound.

Recent Russian history courses through the back story of the St. Petersburg Quartet, which was called the Leningrad Quartet until the end of the Cold War (it changed its name in 1991). On Sunday, they fared best in the Russian musical landscape. Prokofiev’s Second Quartet emerged in gutsy splendor, its Adagio mined for all its stately lyricism, and with focused intensity poured into the final Allegro, its marching cadences flecked with wit and charging flurries.

Three movements from Glazunov’s “Five Novelettes,” colored by a more Neo-Romantic veneer than the Prokofiev, conveyed an implicit narrative character, courtesy of the quartet’s house blend of polish and passion.

After intermission, pianist Mack McCray--replacing the announced but ailing Justin Blasdale--joined the group for Brahms’ F-Minor Piano Quintet, and the Romantic fabric was less than seamless. There was a bit of rough going at first, contrasting the taut ensemble cohesion of the earlier playing, but the connections became firmer and a sense of musical poise more unmistakable by the time of the Scherzo.