Putting its limitations on display

As part of a 10-day residency at UC Irvine, the veteran Chilingirian String Quartet gave an afternoon concert Sunday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. The program was interesting, the performance uneven.

Most uneven: The closer, a collaboration with UCI faculty member Lorna Griffitt in the Schumann Piano Quintet, Opus 44, became a pleasant run-through of a familiar masterpiece in which none of the five participants took the leadership role. Everyone played notes; no one seemed to know the territory.

Griffitt’s mellow, elegant pianism never took the reins, and her fellows -- violinists Levon Chilingirian and Charles Sewart, violist Susie Meszaros and cellist Philip De Groote -- seldom matched her coloristic palette or her usual subtlety. Legato and the long line were mostly missing, Schumann’s many opportunities for single-mindedness also unvisited.

The British ensemble gave a more compelling vision in a United States premiere of the string quartet of their countryman, Gerard Schurmann. This lyric/dramatic work is compact and engaging, and holds the listener through a tight narrative and stunning musical strokes. Its moods change abruptly; it can be tortured, elegiac, stoical, darkly comic, poetic. One wants to hear it again, perhaps with an even broader range of colors. The composer was in the audience and acknowledged a strong response.

What the Chilingirian Quartet lacks, in comparison to its peers on the international scene, is a suave and ingratiating sound profile.

More often than not, its tone colors are limited, crude or just unpleasant. Sometimes, one suspects it is a haphazard approach to intonation that causes this lack of resonance; at other times, the source seems mere absence of interest.

In any case, the sounds produced in the program’s opener, Beethoven’s first quartet, the one in F, Opus 18, No. 1, lacked that core of attractiveness one expects these days.