Music Reviews : Coull String Quartet Makes L.A. Debut

Now on its fifth tour of North America, England’s Coull String Quartet, together since 1974, finally got around to making its Los Angeles debut Monday night, in a Da Camera Society concert at the Hotel Bel-Air.

Noting the welcoming atmospheric conditions for their arrival (wet), second violinist Philip Gallaway said nothing about the actual venue, which ultimately proved most un welcoming to quartet playing. The large and handsome meeting room where the concert took place revealed the acoustical properties of a carpeted hall closet.

And surely, in the annals of seating, few chairs ever created could be more uncomfortable than those provided for the event. Mundane considerations, but they mattered.

It was all the more the shame since the Coull--Roger Coull and Gallaway, violins; David Curtis, viola, and John Todd, cello--offered, at least at times, some exceptional playing.

Haydn’s String Quartet Opus 76, No. 2, “The Fifths,” showed the group at its best for the evening, in a robust and characterful reading. Eschewing the porcelain-vase school of classical interpretation favored by so many quartets, the Coull took full measure of the score, in a many-faceted though never overstated account.

Elsewhere, spotty intonation badgered the players (they tuned no fewer than five times during the evening) and the dead acoustic hampered expression. Beethoven’s Opus 95 Quartet received a wonderfully violent and tautly phrased reading, but all the ring was sapped out of the ensemble’s seemingly rich timbre.

Similarly, the bloom was missing from Mendelssohn’s puzzlingly neglected Opus 44, No. 1 Quartet, sloppy at times in the Coull performance but appropriately heroic and singing at others.