Piano Quartet Derailed by Odd Program

Another season of the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College’s Chamber Music at Historic Sites soirees at the Doheny Mansion came to a close Friday night with a Los Angeles Piano Quartet performance.

As this ever-on-the-move series continues to find one fascinating, hitherto-untapped venue after another, the Doheny gives it an anchor, a reassuring place to land.

Alas, the group’s lengthy program was not one of the more interesting we’ve heard here, with Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478, and Dvora^k’s Piano Quartet in E flat Opus 87 forming a sandwich around Brahms’ Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano. This sequence didn’t really work, for Mozart and Brahms combined to produce a feeling of vague, fatiguing melancholy for nearly an hour and, to my taste, the Dvora^k quartet is not one of his more inspired chamber pieces.

That said, this foursome tried to enliven things, keeping the tempos moving fluidly, giving Dvora^k plenty of energy, if not much rhythmic push. Three of its members, pianist Xak Bjerken, violinist Ayako Yoshida and violist Katherine Murdock, are relatively new, and their balance with sole founding member cellist Peter Rejto was just about right. However, they couldn’t produce a true collective pianissimo at close range in this room, and Yoshida’s fierce, cutting tone projected harshly over Bjerken’s piano in the Brahms sonata.