St. Petersburg Quartet Returns With Another Strong Showing

Honored, prized and admired, the St. Petersburg String Quartet--now in its second decade and on its third name--continues to extend its influence. At its third Southern California visit Tuesday, at Irvine Barclay Theatre, the strong musical impressions the quartet made in separate visits in October and November 1995 were reinforced.

Violinists Alla Aranovskaya and Ilya Teplyakov, violist Konsantin Kats and cellist Leonid Shukaev constitute an ensemble of special accomplishment; their performances have authority, style and breadth. Their technical credentials include high polish and immaculate detailing, and their probing of substantive musical matters yields genuine depth.

Centerpiece of the quartet’s latest appearance sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and Philharmonic Society of Orange County was Shostakovich’s Third Quartet, a demanding and kaleidoscopic work the four players delivered with aplomb, all moods expressed, all dynamics gauged--and with a lively sense of spontaneity.

Pianist Mack McCray, a distinguished teacher on the San Francisco Conservatory faculty for three decades, joined the quartet in a colorful exhumation of the Quintet by Cesar Franck, making its convoluted rhetoric seem natural and unraveling for the listener its many complexities. The performance uncovered sometimes forgotten charms in the score.

The evening’s warmup was no warmup but a genuine introduction. Preceding the distracted jollity of the opening movement of Shostakovich’s F-major Quartet, the ensemble offered Arvo Part’s mournful, plodding, ear-opening “Summa.”