Music Reviews : Tokyo String Quartet, Carter Brey Play Schubert

Precision and passion are hardly an inevitable combination, particularly in a work as physically demanding as Schubert’s String Quintet in C. The notes conquered and the shape of the piece determined, runaway intensity and enthusiasm can still make a technical shambles of the music.

This as prelude to an attempt at describing Wednesday’s performance by the Tokyo String Quartet and cellist Carter Brey in the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel: quite simply (hah!), the most fully realized exposition of this core component of the repertory this listener has ever encountered.

The Tokyo’s Schubert sang, it blazed, it crooned, it shrieked, it lulled, it thrilled.

Among the vital ingredients of this Chamber Music in Historic Sites event were, of course, the ensemble’s technical polish and comprehensive understanding of the idiom. The dynamic range employed was astonishing. The softest pianissimos in the sublimely attenuated Adagio emerged full-toned; the crunching, fortissimo sonorities of the finale were compact, edgeless. Momentum never flagged. The great lyric arches seemed to span eternity.

In all this the Tokyo foursome--violinists Peter Oundjian and Kikuei Ikeda, violist Kazuhide Isomura, cellist Sadao Harada--had the invaluable assistance of Brey, an artist of rare perceptiveness, whose expressive, subtly varied pizzicatos in the first movement--repetitious, throwaway pluckings in lesser hands--proved memorable.

The first half of the program was devoted to material from Schubert’s 17th year: a quartet fragment in D minor, D. 103--early Beethoven revisited but not quite digested--and the Quartet in B-flat, D. 112, projecting a more perceptibly Schubertian voice without altogether kicking the Mozartean traces.