Borromeo Quartet Plays With Gusto

The Borromeo String Quartet, composed of four graduates of the Curtis Institute, is an immensely accomplished ensemble, as evidenced by its concert for the Da Camera Society at the Doheny Mansion on Friday.

Even by today’s Olympian chamber music standards, these young people--violinists Nicholas Kitchen and Ruggero Allifranchini, violist Hsin-Yun Huang, cellist Yeesun Kim--are masters of any technical challenges thrown their way. And the works by the three composers involved on this occasion--Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Stravinsky--are unstinting in their demands.

The Borromeo’s response was to tear into the music with almost untempered ferocity and, often, extreme volume. Their big tone and nerve-frazzlingly virile approach best served Stravinsky’s spikily insidious Concertino, in as virtuosic and stylistically apt a reading of that little thriller as I can recall. And while the grand passions of the 16-year-old Mendelssohn’s A-minor Quartet found able protagonists here, the score’s tenderness and fantasy went by the boards, swamped by the players’ take-no-prisoners onslaught.

Although the evening’s most substantial component, the Beethoven Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, had its problems, too--chiefly, a tendency of the second violin to fade from earshot and a mannered, in rhythm and dynamics, second movement--its greatest challenge, the ethereal “Song of Thanksgiving,” was delivered with breathtaking sensitivity, its grand emotional arch shaped with masterful control of tempo, dynamics and tone color.

We’ll be hearing more--and even better, once the fires have cooled a bit--from the Borromeo Quartet in the future. Count on it.