St. Petersburg Quartet Plays With One Voice

Masters of subtlety and refinement, the members of the St. Petersburg String Quartet embodied the chamber music ideal of four voices speaking as one Monday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Yet there was nothing tepid or unilluminating about the music-making of violinists Alla Aranovskaya and Ilya Teplyakov, violist Aleksey Koptev and cellist Leonid Shukaev in the three-part program.

Beethoven, for them, was no wide-eyed radical kicking the aristocracy--and incidentally the Classical era--in the shins. He was a model of strength and dignity, holding his own at the loftiest levels of civilized behavior.

If sometimes the first “Razumovsky” Quartet (Opus 59, No. 1) seemed a study in pianissimo, it also became a portrait of refusing to over-dramatize personal pain.

Interestingly, none of this prevented hearing the more romantic styles of Brahms and Dvorak that were suggested in the final movement.

Prokofiev was one of the Soviet composers evacuated to a northern region for safety during the Nazi advance into the country. There he discovered indigenous folk idioms, which he adapted in his String Quartet No. 2.

For the quartet, Prokofiev was no barbarian using these idioms to assault an audience. Rather he was a playful, joyous discoverer of Mother Russia’s strength and optimism. The war seemed very far away indeed, at least until the highly conflicted, fragmented final movement, and even there native resilience triumphed.

The musicians’ urbanity also well suited the cosmopolitan and sunny Latin wit of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, making sure not to overpower fluent guest artist Paul Galbaith in the Quintet for Strings and Guitar.

The concert was sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. The musicians repeated the slow movement of the Guitar Quintet as their single encore.