Music Review : Pro Arte Quartet Plays at County Museum

Extraordinary polish and burning intensity characterized the playing Thursday at the County Museum of Art Bing Theater, where the Pro Arte Quartet delivered an unusual program of Beethoven and Bloch.

The evening opened with a rare performance of Beethoven’s 1799 Quartet in F, which a couple of years later became the Opus 18, No. 1. The composer did make some substantive changes, tightening up development sections to create stronger harmonic motion, but this early version still has the character and drive of the familiar opus.

In other words, it is still great music. Having reached that verdict, however, one must give credit to the skillful advocacy of the Wisconsin-based ensemble, which infused its performance with boundless vitality, telling drama and unusual eloquence. Paying close heed to the score’s often-sudden dynamic changes, the four delivered a strikingly bold yet never unwieldy reading.

A Middle Period quartet--Opus 59, No. 3--followed, and the Pro Arte took its fervent, expressive approach a step further. The players may have traded subtlety and delicateness for incandescence and power, but as before, the ensemble remained taut, the intonation accurate and the technique clean.

Following intermission, they turned up the heat still further. Joined by pianist Howard Karp, violinists Norman Paulu and Jae Kim, violist Richard Blum and cellist Parry Karp put extraordinary muscle into the driving ostinatos of Ernest Bloch’s First Piano Quintet. Alas, that wasn’t enough to redeem this nearly endless stream of melodically barren, rhythmically repetitious, thick-textured muck. Moreover, in their zeal for explosive power, the musicians lost some of the control they had earlier exhibited, and both intonation and tone quality suffered.

Listening to an automobile horn blare for 30 minutes would have been less enjoyable, but only slightly.