Dunsmuir Rises to Challenge With a Refined Performance

The Dunsmuir Piano Quartet, a polished and time-honed ensemble, began its three-night Los Angeles run Monday at Pierce College amid an air of transition. The final program of the Music Guild’s concert season, the tour also marks the group’s final local appearances with first violinist Ron Copes, who will join the Juilliard String Quartet in the summer.

A certain poignancy hovered over the performance, recognizing that the sense of seasoning and empathetic group think will soon come to an end, or at least transition into a new era.

Since forming in 1986, the ensemble, which includes violinists Cope and Roxann Jacobsen, cellist Jennifer Culp and pianist Justin Blasdale, has taken up the cause of contemporary music. This program, however, stuck to the realm of romantic impulses, including pre-angst, early Beethoven, Brahms’ middle-Romantic Piano Quartet in C Minor, Opus 60, and 20th century post-Romanticism of Spanish composer Joaquin Turina’s Piano Quartet in A Minor, Opus 67. The group rose to nearly every challenge.

The Turina piece may be an acquired taste, one listener’s passion being another’s florid excess, but the group soared. Beethoven’s Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Opus 16 is a pristine gem, here showcasing Blasdale’s exacting touch.

Taking up the concert’s second half, Brahms’ brooding C Minor quartet is hardly a light piece, but has its passages of lyric relief, as in the Andante, with its tender opening melody beautifully conveyed via Copes’ singing tone. Expectedly, the quartet hugged the tight dynamic turns for dear life. This was, and is, a fine, refined chamber ensemble. The quartet’s run ends tonight at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.