Rossetti Plays With Passion

Barely 4 years old and already a vital force among chamber-music ensembles, the Rossetti String Quartet seems to grow in stature at each hearing. Its latest local appearance, opening the new season of the Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites, came Friday night, and on only a few days’ notice.

The Leipzig String Quartet, scheduled to begin the Mount St. Mary’s College-sponsored series, last week canceled its United States tour due to illness among its members. Friday, at the Doheny Mansion downtown, the Rossetti foursome stepped in and exuberantly performed a serious and generous program.

Except that they do not invariably use the quiet end of their dynamic spectrum as often or as deeply as possible, these four players--violinists Nina Bodnar and Henry Gronnier, violist Thomas Diener and cellist Eric Gaenslen--operate their music-making with solid resources of energy, technique and single-mindedness. Their playing is stylistically informed, passionate and controlled.

They brought the deepest kinds of scrutiny to Beethoven’s many-faceted B-flat Quartet, Opus 18, No. 6, to the broad expanse of hues possible in the Ravel Quartet, and to the mercurial emotional changes that fill Dvorak’s E-flat Quartet, Opus 51, the “Slavonic.” And they did it all together, with an invisible leadership that seems to reside everywhere at once and with mechanical attributes that gleam with polish.

For the Sites series, each season is a challenge to top itself. This season has started off in the right direction.