Juilliard Quartet Plays With Expressive Color, Edge

The Juilliard String Quartet, in any of its incarnations, has never shied from challenge. Saturday it outdid itself in that regard, offering its Carpenter Performing Arts Center audience a demanding agenda of weighty and surpassingly serious works by Mozart, Schoenberg and Beethoven.

Confronted with a typically mechanistic analysis of one of his works, Schoenberg once plaintively exclaimed, “But where are the tunes?” The Juilliard four appeared to have no doubts about that, playing his Quartet No. 4 with lyric heat. The expressive goal of a phrase counted for more than its pitch permutations in their scheme, not that there was anything in the least imprecise or unconsidered about their intense, cathartic interpretation.

The present lineup, in place now for almost two years, is an egalitarian one and inclined to do some of its most moving work at soft and feathery levels. Violinists Joel Smirnoff and Ronald Copes, violist Samuel Rhodes and cellist Joel Krosnick brought discernment as well as passion to the task in a performance notable for both color and edge.

The same qualities made for some rather vehement Mozart. The dark and vital D minor Quartet, K. 421, bears that nicely, however. This was an unapologetically emotional reading, a little slow, perhaps, but fluent and rich in contextual interconnections.

Asking as much in concentration of their listeners as of themselves, the Juilliards closed with the seven uninterrupted movements of Beethoven’s Quartet in C sharp minor, Opus 131. They seemed to be hunters tracking some prime motive through the work’s polyphonic thickets and mercurial mood swings, taking joy in the composer’s inspiration and in their own ability to follow it at any pace.

The playing was confident and clean, of course. More important, it was fresh and eager for surprises, despite the obviously exhaustive care and preparation.