A Wobbly Outing by Berlin Philharmonic Quartet

Sunday afternoon Coleman Chamber Concerts presented the Berlin Philharmonic Piano Quartet in what looked to be a full house in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech in Pasadena.

In a pleasant but undistinguished performance, the musicians--three string players from the great German orchestra, plus the group’s founder, Russian pianist Pavel Gililov--offered a varied program of piano quartets by Mozart, Martinu and Schumann. Overall, the playing emerged as nervous, unbalanced and, most surprisingly, underrehearsed.

Schumann’s Opus 47 lacked the authority and musical thrust one might have expected from this ensemble. Among other disappointments, the failure of the three string players--violinist Rainer Sonne, violist Rainer Mehne and cellist Markus Nyikos--to assume equal leadership with pianist Gililov. Except from the piano, this was a timid, largely unarticulated performance.

The novelty of the agenda was a fair revival of Martinu’s First Piano Quartet (1942), an odd combination of prewar melancholy and 1940s American optimism, written in the year after the composer arrived in this country. It offers pages of grim stoicism alternating with passages of dumb hope--not unlike music being turned out in those days by Aaron Copland and Roy Harris. It has its charms, but mostly it is irritating--and large sections of the opening movement are just plain ugly.

At the start of the afternoon’s program, Mozart’s Quartet in G minor, K. 478, given a mostly neat and orderly performance appropriate to Mozart’s jollity, indicated more accomplishment than the ensemble later delivered.