The Tokyo Quartet Rises to Brainy Challenges

On Sunday, it was appropriate that the Tokyo String Quartet brought Mozart’s last quartet, a work in which the composer’s creativity moves at stupefying speed and complexity, to Caltech, one of the country’s great brain trusts.

The opening pages of the Quartet in F, K. 590, unfold in unpredictable but fitting ways at just about every bar. The development section serves as relief from change and surprise rather than, typically, an exploration of these qualities. At one of the worst times of his oft-miserable and soon-to-be-over life, Mozart was revising his peerless style, pruning, redirecting, challenging even the best minds to keep up.

The members of the Tokyo Quartet--violinists Mikhail Kopelman and Kikuei Ikeda, violist Kazuhide Isomura and cellist Clive Greensmith--didn’t try to interpret it. They played it straight and clean; they kept up with it.

Their four-part concert--on the Coleman Chamber Concerts series in Beckman Auditorium--included works that needed more interpretation, however. Brahms’ first Quartet, in C Minor, Opus 51, No. 1, which, after intermission, followed Mozart, sounded contained and hermetic, limited in dynamics and expressivity.

The program opened with a single-vision performance of Schubert’s “Quartettsatz,” the only surviving movement of a projected work and the first statement in his mature quartet style. Next followed a novelty, Webern’s “Langsamer Satz,” written in 1905. It is such an early work, in such an uncharacteristically late-Romantic melodic rather than 12-tone style, it could serve as a party-trick, guess-the-composer question that would baffle almost anyone. At 11 minutes, it’s personal, it’s direct, it’s competent--though it goes on too long--but it’s a dead end, and we can only be glad Webern soon changed direction radically.