Music Reviews : Tokyo String Quartet Opens Coleman Season

The Tokyo String Quartet celebrated its 20th anniversary season on Sunday with a concert for the Coleman Chamber Music Assn., whose annual competition, a major event in those days, the Tokyo won in 1969, setting the stage for the group’s dazzling international career.

However, the ensemble’s appearance on Sunday in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech provided a muted, decidedly non-festive opening for this season’s series of Coleman Concerts. The group was well below its best form in a drab program that began with an expendable, overlong piece of Schubert juvenilia, his Quartet in C, D. 32.

Subsequently, spirits--the audience’s and the players’--hardly soared on the wings of the Quartet in A, the most conventional segment of Beethoven’s Opus 18.

Still, it is hardly the salon trifle these artists made it out to be in their orderly, soft-grained presentation. A measure of rhythmic intensity, greater variety of tone--bland sweetness was pervasive--would have helped.

Ravel, in his Quartet in F, gave performers every opportunity for displays of temperament and technical finesse. But the Tokyo members--violinists Peter Oundjian and Kikuei Ikeda, violist Kazuhide Isomura, cellist Sadao Harada--remained stubbornly resistant to its blandishments on this occasion.

Their underemphatic interpretation was, furthermore, riddled with uncharacteristic mechanical lapses. Most damaging were the imbalances that made the second violin all but disappear from the opening movement and instances of mis-intonation from the first violinist and, more frequently, the violist.

It was simply not the Tokyo String Quartet’s day.