San Francisco Classical Voice

The members of the Arlekin Quartet met as students at the Moscow Conservatory more than 20 years ago. They are familiar figures to Bay Area audiences, not only as a quartet but individually — all are busy recitalists and orchestral musicians. The quartet's sound is wiry and intense, with first violinist Eugene Chukhlov's bright timbre and cellist Sergei Riabtchenko's penetrating one setting the tone. Second violinist Igor Veligan is a consistently powerful presence, while violist Rem Djemilev's unusual, smoky timbre is sometimes put to startling use.

The Arlekins' program was an odd one, none of the three works having much to do with the other two. The slow introductory movement to the quartet version of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross opened the concert. Djemilev, in his characteristically charming remarks to the audience, dedicated the performance to the memory of the great quartet cellist and longtime Bay Area resident Colin Hampton, with whom the Arlekins had studied the complete work.

It would be interesting to know how much this performance drew on Hampton's teaching, because there were some unusual points in it. The forte music was as you'd expect from a Russian-trained quartet: sonorous, dense, impassioned. But the quieter passages made no attempt to be seductive, or even particularly ingratiating. There was a wan quality to Chukhlov's violin playing — a kind of resignation that was the more eloquent for not seeming to try to persuade.

From there, it was a surprisingly small distance to Shostakovich's seventh and briefest quartet. There are more imposing and more demonstrative works in Shostakovich's career-spanning quartet cycle, but nothing else quite like this sad, wistful little masterpiece. Its 12 scant minutes encompass grief, fury, nostalgia, resignation, and serenity, with painful concentration.

The Arlekins' performance caught the strange, fraught emotional tone of the piece well. The raw rage of the third movement's fugato was terrific. Djemilev lit into his instrument's C string with such fervor that I thought he would leap out of his chair. Eloquent, also, was the pained, limping waltz the fugato is later transformed into, and this in turn led effortlessly back to the opening-movement material with which the piece ends. The slow movement's desolate few pages were eerily still.

Putting Tchaikovsky's riotously tuneful Souvenir de Florence right after Shostakovich's delicate study in anguish looked rather like an experiment in juxtaposing the extremes of the Russian musical character. Be that as it may, the Arlekins, with guest violist Edith Szendrey and bassist Michel Taddei, effectively dispelled all memory of the Shostakovich's atmosphere in the first flamboyant bars of the Tchaikovsky. The performance was wild, colorful, occasionally haphazard, but always warm-hearted and enthusiastic. Chukhlov and Riabtchenko were both in fine, sonorous form, making the most of their juicy parts. The second movement's violin-cello love duets were lovely, especially the second one, in which the cello takes the lead. Djemilev, for his part, brought his earthy sound richly to bear in his big third movement solo. Szendrey’s diffident second-viola lines tended to get buried in the mix.

The Souvenir de Florence is, of course, originally for two violins, two violas, and two cellos, and playing the second cello part on bass requires some adjustment. Taddei, so far as I could tell, incorporated as many of the notes as possible, and kept to the lower octave (below where a cello would play) most of the time. Where the part dovetails with other instruments, he sometimes flew up the octave to make the joins work.

The low bassline made for some strangely voiced chords, especially where Taddei retained Tchaikovsky's double-stopping in the low octave. I'm not persuaded that the piece really works this way, but in a few places the bass was strikingly effective, such as in the second, cello-led appearance of the second movement's violin-cello duet, where the instrument gave a kick to the double-stopped fifth drone.

Through it all, the mood was of good friends enjoying a romp and letting the rest of us listen in on the fun. Superfinessed it was not, but then, in chamber music — and in Tchaikovsky — finesse is not always the point.