Guarneri Quartet Plays Sweet Farewell to Cellist

The four men of the Guarneri Quartet played the Irvine Barclay Theatre Monday night on a farewell tour--at least the quartet as we know it. After 35 years with the same personnel--violinists Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violist Michael Tree and cellist David Soyer--the quartet will enter the new millennium with Peter Wiley taking over for Soyer, who wants to curtail touring.

The Guarneri had a tough act to follow. On Sunday night, the Kronos Quartet played the same hall, and people in the audience were whispering superlatives about it.

As it turned out, however, the Guarneri had nothing to fear. Beginning with the quartet’s first note, the packed house was raptly in tune with it, and neither side let down its concentration until it was over.

The Guarneri began with Mozart Quartet in G, K. 387, the first of six dedicated in 1782 to Mozart’s beloved friend Haydn.

It’s usually played as the light and charming thing the exuberant young Mozart probably had in mind. The Guarneri, however, went a sadder route and explored with the kind of love and intensity that an old friend would put into a farewell.

The slow movement was particularly transforming, with its extraordinary flights of virtuosity resolving into quieter, more reflective joys. The Guarneris’ flashing performance of the final movement’s dashing tour de force showed it has not lost its skill at playing fast, not loose.

Next came Zoltan Kodaly’s Second Quartet, Op. 10, written in 1918, a powerful effort by the Hungarian composer, who--with Bartok--adapted the great classical models of string quartet writing, from Haydn to Brahms, to the non-Western inflections of Hungarian speech and its rich and, to Western ears, idiosyncratic veins of folk music.

It is music that is obscure and popular by turns. It was once heard frequently, but rarely any more. The Guarneri gave it the performance of a lifetime, the eventual heady climaxes driven by folk-dance rhythms compelling enough to make the audience feel that wading through some early 20th century harmonic meanderings was well worth the time.

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After intermission, the concert concluded with the first of Robert Schumann’s three Opus 41 Quartets. Schumann composed it in the summer of 1842, when he was 32, after a spring spent reading the quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Though it outwardly resembles the music those other composers wrote--the main tune of the slow movement, for example, closely resembles one from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony--Schumann’s First is cast in a form and with a shimmering, romantic intensity that is completely of his novel and fevered imagination.

Great string quartets love to play Schumann because the sexually charged emotional barriers with which he surrounds his musical treasures can make playing his work very satisfying indeed. Not surprisingly, the great Guarneri quartet gave of every musical and physical resource it had to unravel the music’s gentle but glorious mysteries, as if it were the musical equivalent of a magnificent Faberge egg.

After three rounds of warm applause, through which it modestly declined to give an encore, the Guarneri Quartet as it has existed for more than a third of a century slipped away. Its tour will continue in the Bay Area, then throughout the country into next year.

Although the Guarneri has made many recordings and has been the subject of two books and a movie, it is in concert that these four towering men are to be most truly found. To produce such an uncompromising program, particularly in the face of today’s shift away from what was once central string quartet literature, is a tribute in itself.

That they had the energy and commitment to give performances that not only extended our understanding and love of the music, but demanded as much of themselves as of the audience, was a stirring reminder of what it once meant to be a bearer of classical music’s sacred flame.

The Guarneri came to town under the joint auspices of the Laguna Chamber Music Society, celebrating its 40th anniversary, and the Orange County Philharmonic Society, midway through its six-week Eclectic Orange Festival 1999.