MUSIC REVIEWS : Piano Quartet Intrigues at UCLA

The novelty on the latest program by the peripatetic Los Angeles Piano Quartet was a 5-year-old work by John Harbison called “November 19, 1828: Hallucination in Four Episodes.” It is, to state simply what proves to be complicated in concept, execution and comprehensibility, a meditation on Schubert, and his death, by one of his musical descendants.

In 17 multifaceted minutes and a brief sampler of 20th-Century idioms, the colorful work veers over the aural landscape, or at least that part of the landscape possible to this combination of instruments. It shifts moods and direction regularly, sometimes apparently arbitrarily, seems to laugh and cry in adjacent moments, sings and croons, rushes through angry attitudes, becomes stoic.

It is usually engaging, although the LAPQ (as the group abbreviates itself) seemed to fail to make all parts of it connect. Perhaps the failure is the composer’s; one cannot be sure. Still, violinist Joseph Genualdi, violist Randolph Kelly, cellist Peter Rejto and pianist James Bonn, brought an abundance of skills and authority to the piece, and one was titillated by it.

The rest of the program emerged elegantly performed, if not emotionally engrossing. In Dvorak’s Piano Quartet in D, Opus 23, the players formed a cohesive ensemble and balanced their separate contributions neatly. They merely forgot to project the work’s gut content and to prove that it is worth reviving. Duty was served but uncompellingly.

Brahms’ monumental C-minor Quartet at least received impassioned treatment and some wonderful individual moments from Genualdi and Kelly, in particular. But more probing was possible, a deeper sense of that characteristic Brahmsian lyricism. The composer’s courage appeared but not his heartbreak.

For an encore, the ensemble played--most beautifully, and with a genuine pianissimo missing in the concert proper--the slow movement from Faure’s C-minor Piano Quartet.