Strings Attached

Aviv String Quartet
In Concert
Performing Arts Center
Sunny Hills High Campus
1801 Warburton Way, Fullerton
Today, Sun. Dec. 4, 2011; 3:30 PM

String quartets can boast of so much transcendent repertoire that it's easy to understand why Music Societies tend to favor this complement of instruments.

Performing today at the Performing Arts Center on the Sunny Hills High Campus in Fullerton, the Aviv String Quartet, was founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1997 by first and second violinists Sergey Ostrovsky and Evgenia Epshtein. The newer members of the group are violist Nathan Braude and cellist Rachel Mercer, who interact with their colleagues to seamless, eloquent effect.

The Aviv's program reveals an ensemble that blends potent interpretive skills with technical precision. Every phrase has a purpose in the overall context; every detail emerges as a crucial element in the musical message.

There was no room for charm or frivolity on the occasion I saw them in Cleveland. The musicians chose three compelling scores that probe the depths of human feeling, often to bleak ends.

They began with Erwin Schulhoff's String Quartet No. 1, a work of haunting and haunted personality. The Czech composer, a victim of the Holocaust, wrote the piece in 1924, when he was starting to emerge as an important musical voice.

Schulhoff's language in the first quartet is based in conventional tonality but marked by heightened tension and drama. The four movements take the ensemble through motoric unison passages, disembodied utterances, wild dances and mysterious corners.

In the finale, the ticking of a clock conjures an aura of tragic resignation. It is a stunning achievement by a neglected composer the Aviv is saluting on a recording being released this month on the Naxos label.

The mood in Shostakovich's Quartet No. 4 in D major is scarcely more optimistic, despite the flirtation with a major key. Folk elements pervade the activity, whose doleful lines occasionally give way to impassioned and angry gestures.

The last movement is the heart of the score – a tortured journey that touches earthy, quizzical and vehement terrain. The music fades away as if unable to go on any longer.

After two such emotional immersions, Brahms' Quartet in C minor, Op. 51, No. 1, could have come across as a wave of weary romanticism. But the Aviv treated the score with the same urgency, poetry and cohesion they applied to the previous works.

Ostrovsky, a violinist of commanding sophistication and expressivity, led a performance that was testament to the ensemble's remarkable ability to characterize the music from the inside out. The players maintained fine control, while also bringing subtle shading and penetrating tonal focus to Brahms' sometimes protracted statements.

Preview/review by Daniel Rosenberg
Mr. Rosenberg writes about music for the Cleveland Plain Dealer