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RECITAL REVIEW
March 19, 2004
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By Scott MacClelland
The Los Angeles Piano Quartet's most recent personnel change felicitously enhanced an already strong ensemble. Heard in their appearance at Carmel's Sunset Center last Friday, violinist Michi Wiancko played with artistic authority and a big golden tone. So long as the only remaining founding member of the LAPQ, cellist Peter Rejto, is happy with the arrangement, Wiancko should expect every encouragement to develop her leadership with the ensemble.
The piano quartet (violin, viola, cello and piano) can claim more masterpieces per capita than any other chamber music form. Against scores of string quartets and piano trios, the piano quartet repertoire has attracted outstanding works by every major chamber music composer since Mozart, making up with quality what it lacks in quantity. Even though the LAPQ's other founders have moved on (violinist Joseph Genualdi is principal with the Chicago String Quartet, violist Ronald Copes now plays second violin with the Juilliard Quartet, pianist James Bonn is a USC emeritus professor) the Quartet had, and has, every reason for a secure future.
The Carmel program included Mozart's Quartet in E flat (K493,) Brahms' Quartet in C Minor (Op. 60) and Fauré's Quartet in G Minor (Op. 45.) The order proved fortuitous; the Brahms was better than the Mozart, the Fauré best of all. Pioneering the form, Mozart produced two such works, the more popular G Minor, and the E flat. While the piece alternates between the piano and the strings, it does so with a near-overabundance of call and response. In this case, pianist Xak Bjerken had the most solo work but, despite a finished technique, displayed a narrow imagination with his material. Moreover, the piano sounded heavy where a period pianoforte could have delivered a more suitable texture for the music.
The newly renovated Sunset Theater left unresolved an acoustic dilemma due to its insufficient volume of space. In its natural state, the hall is dry but clear. Instrumental voices enjoy both presence and integrity, but the room tends to shine enough bright acoustic light on them to exaggerate their timbres, not always flatteringly. For example, Wiancko's violin made a bigger and more well-rounded sound than did Rejto's magnificent 1721 Montagnana, while Katherine Murdock's viola delivered a pinched, nasally tone. In this case, the room seemed to favor those instruments correctly engineered for their compasses; though designed to fit musicians, in terms of physics the cello and the viola — particularly — are not large enough for their ranges. On the other hand, in the Brahms and Fauré, the piano sounded right. (To date, none of the classical presenters using Sunset, except the Bach Festival, has elected to engage the $300,000 LARES electronic enhancement system designed to optimize the sound of live music in the room.) After a muscular opening allegro, the scherzo of the Brahms took a blazing ride, with gypsy affectations. Rejto's big moment ached longingly in the andante (the program handout listed the wrong movement titles and order) and the finale, with its ‘development' quotes from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, trembled with quickening energy right up to its perfunctory closing cadence. Where the Brahms deployed its material lavishly among the four instruments in savory ever-changing combinations, the Fauré emphasized the radiant colors and parallel surges so familiar in French instrumental music at the turn of the 20th century. The ghost of Franck haunted the four movements, made all the more sensual by Fauré's impressionism, here etched with sparkling dynamics, shimmering shadows and light. After the dreamy adagio, the musicians plunged headlong into the work's final allegro, a whirlwind of exuberant seduction and deliverance. The sponsoring Mozart Society of California has just announced its 2004/2005 season, including the Perlman-Schmidt-Bailey (piano) Trio, Lark (string) Quartet, pianist Mari Kodama, soprano Anja Strauss and violinist Ivan Zenaty.
(Scott MacClelland, since 1978, has written music criticism and journalism for all the major newspapers on the Monterey Peninsula, and for the Metro papers in Santa Cruz and San Jose. During the same period, he has taught music history for Monterey Peninsula College.)
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