MUIR QUARTET, St. Mary's Catholic Church, Park City, Thursday
PARK CITY — The Muir Quartet is certainly no stranger to Park City. For more than two decades, the group has been coming to the mountain resort annually giving concerts and holding workshops for emerging quartets.
Now connected with the Utah Symphony's Deer Valley Music Festival, the quartet — currently consisting of violinists Peter Zazofsky and Lucia Lin, violist Steve Ansell and cellist Michael Reynolds — continues its Utah musical tradition.
Thursday, the ensemble gave the first of two concerts in St. Mary's Catholic Church, playing music by Joaquin Turina, Alban Berg and Franz Schubert.
While a wonderfully diverse and rewarding program, the foursome never truly appeared engaged in the music. Nor was there any sense of rapport among the musicians. Furthermore, Zazofsky had an irritating problem with intonation that plagued him throughout the evening. In the end, the Muir showed Thursday it is a capable quartet, but it's definitely no Emerson or Guarneri.
The evening began with Turina's wonderfully atmospheric "La Oracion del Torero (The Bullfighter's Prayer)". Turina, whose music blends French impressionism with Spanish folk elements, is a wonderfully coloristic composer. His music is unjustly neglected today by performers and needs to find its proper place in the standard chamber repertoire.
The Muir gave a decent reading of "La Oracion del Torero," which captured the colors and sonorities of the piece effectively.
Berg's two-movement String Quartet, op. 3, followed. It is an early work, written in 1910. The quartet shows the 25-year-old composer emerging from the tutelage of his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and finding his own voice. The quartet's musical style lies between tonality and atonlity without completely embracing either. It's intoxicatingly expressionistic, decadently Viennese and refreshingly original.
The Muir managed to capture the large gestures and intense expressions fairly well. It was a solid performance that was predictable and, unfortunately, rather perfunctory. Their reading of the opening movement was somewhat lackluster, but they did bring some passion to the second. Still, the work deserves better.
Closing out the concert was Schubert's Quartet in A minor, op. 29 ("Rosamunde"), so-called since Schubert borrows a theme he used in the incidental music he wrote to the play of the same name.
This quartet, too, received a rather bland reading. The performance was decent but uninspired, and lacked vitality and spontaneity. Nor was there any cohesiveness to the playing. Expressions were missing and nuances were non-existent.
Of the four movements in the Schubert, the Andante received the best reading. The foursome evinced a more fluid playing style here that wasn't present in the other movements.
E-mail: ereichel@desnews.com