Passion pours from Ives Quartet concert – Mercury News Monday, May 14, 2007

BIG SOUND OVERWHELMS CHAMBER MUSIC VENUE

By Richard Scheinin

If you’re a chamber music nut, you know the Bay Area is saturated with terrific string quartets: the Kronos, St. Lawrence, Alexander, Turtle Island, Cypress and so on. But even the biggest nuts haven’t all heard about the Ives Quartet, and that’s a crime.

Because the Ives, which gave a typically superb performance Saturday night at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose, is right there in the upper echelon of chamber groups based in the region. It still flies under a lot of people’s radar; the Trianon wasn’t exactly packed. But that’s bound to change if the quartet continues to perform at this level, with this much energy and panache.

At Saturday’s concert, the group’s last of the season, the Ives’s arresting sound was again on display: robust, rigorous and beautifully blended. Whether the group was playing Beethoven, Dvorak or Quincy Porter, the 20th-century American composer whose works are becoming an Ives specialty, the music felt thoroughly absorbed, idiomatic, performed from the inside-out.

What’s remarkable is that the quartet, which dates in various convolutions to 1983, has recently undergone personnel changes. Bettina Mussumeli, its first violinist, is finishing only her second season; violist Jodi Levitz, her first. Both are refined, passionate players, and have quickly melded with cellist Stephen Harrison and second violinist Susan Freier.

Beethoven’s early String Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4, opened the concert: a delicate equipoise, beyond quiet, was achieved in the Scherzo. The rocking Allegro seemed to vibrate the air in the hall; all those poor, invisible atoms knocked about.

Next came Porter, a New England Yankee who emerged a generation after Charles Ives (the quartet’s namesake), studied with Ives’ composition teacher, Horatio Parker, at Yale and taught at Yale for years.

The Ives, which hopes to record all nine of Porter’s string quartets for the Naxos label (the first four are due out in July), played his String Quartet No. 3, from 1930. It sounded dynamic, sturdily American, at times Yankee-Stoic, yet also optimistic, tuneful, hymn-like. And what energy the Ives pumped into the finale, a mad dance, with surprising echoes of Eastern Europe.

That made a neat connection to Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A Major, for which the Ives was joined by pianist Paul Hersh, an estimable player. The five performed with all the passion one could ask for – but too much sound for the reverberant little hall. The result was a fiery but somewhat unbalanced performance.

Contact Richard Scheinin at rscheinin@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5069.