Music Review : Unruffled Mastery From Guarneri Quartet

The comparison is inevitable and irresistible: On Wednesday, as the Rolling Stones were packing in the mega-thousands at the Rose Bowl, just down the road in Pasadena, Ambassador Auditorium was packing ‘em in for a rather different attraction, a concert by the Guarneri String Quartet.

OK, the numbers may not have been quite the same, but either way it was a sellout for groups who have been doing their remarkable thing for three decades with undiminished skill.

In as imaginative a program as any mainstream chamber ensemble has presented here in years, the Guarneri, whose personnel--violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree, cellist David Soyer--has been constant since its inception, rewarded their hearers with the lushness of tone, immaculate balances and unruffled mastery that have marked the group’s best work throughout its existence. For slashing attacks, urban tensions and the latest musicological research, look elsewhere.

The program began with a rarity, the sunny, but with passing clouds, E-flat Quartet of the precocious Juan Arriaga, born in 1806 and destined not to survive his teens. The Guarneri played it with beguiling charm and airborne grace.

The dark, throbbing heart of the program was the other and less frequently encountered of Leos Janacek’s two stunning quartets, the one written in 1923 and subtitled “The Kreutzer Sonata,” after Tolstoy’s short story.

The work’s 18 unremittingly inspired minutes, with their incisive pauses, craggy rhythms and brief, achingly lyrical phrases, were delivered on this occasion with tremendous vitality and with the sort of sonic bloom rarely accorded this music by performers more intent on illuminating its “modernity.”

Mendelssohn trying to be Beethoven is a losing battle, but when played with as much conviction--some ensemble miscues and intonational lapses in the opening movement aside--as by the Guarneri, even Mendelssohn’s E-flat Quartet, Opus 44, No. 3, takes on considerable allure.

But for the ultimate in refinement--vintage Guarneri magic, if you will--one had to wait for the encore: as glowing, glamorous and lush a performance of the moonstruck slow movement from Debussy’s Quartet as this listener can recall, even from the Guarneri String Quartet.