Intimacy Achieved by American Quartet

An opera rehearsal had taken over Founders Hall, the usual venue for the Chamber Music Series at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. So the intimacy of a small area was re-created in Segerstrom Hall Friday night by seating the audience on stage with the American String Quartet. But listeners soon discovered they would share more than space with the players: They would be privy to highly distinctive and communicative performances.

Violinists Peter Winograd and Laurie Carney, violist Daniel Avshalomov and cellist David Geber--the quartet-in-residence at the Manhattan School of Music in New York--invited Brian Dembow to open the program with them in Mozart’s Quintet in D for Strings, K. 593. The violist of the Angeles Quartet, Dembow seemed at home with the foursome, participating equally in refined characterizations and virtuosic solos as Winograd led the ensemble through a spirited, colorful reading enriched by sensitive dovetailing and great precision.

These qualities took on a hard edge for Bartok’s tense, angular Quartet No. 3. Animation turned to relentless energy, coloration to brutality, exactness to suspenseful interplay of voices. The result was a tour de force of purposeful, dark statements and melancholy musings by like-minded, outspoken individuals.

The five instrumentalists in the second half of the concert--when Angeles Quartet cellist Steven Erdody joined the core group--could not completely stitch together seams for Schubert’s Quintet in C, D. 956. Still, if the composer’s fitful moods did not shift without effort, they did affect through rhythmic insistence, huge dynamic contrasts and a series of gracious duos.